WTI Magazine #31    2014 May, 22
Author : Laurence Cantor      Translation by:

In July, 2013, Vittorio Capotorto, Founder and Artistic Director of italytheater and its parent organization, Teatromania, asked me to write a script that would best help a wide American audience to get to know the work of the great Italian playwright, actor and director Eduardo De Filippo.

We agreed that the result had to be a new, thoroughly American play and one accessible to New Yorkers, first and foremost. Vittorio added that the new play would be performed in 2014 as part of the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the passing of the inimitable author, who was born in Naples in 1900.

My source was the play Long-Legged Lies, written by Eduardo in 1946. It was written in his home town, Naples, and premiered there that same year. Naples was one of the most bombed out and utterly destroyed cities in Europe in the
wake of the Second World War which had finally ended the year before. The War is a key character in the play; it informs every human character in various ways, but De Filippo's genius as a playwright was that he barely references the War itself directly. It is a play about people living their lives amidst the ghosts of the War, its destruction all around them. Although it is uniquely Neapolitan in every way, it has a universal message. It is a play with about how people the world over have a tendency to lie; this includes all social orders, all historic periods and every place, class and calling – politicians being a great and truly universal example.

We may lie to others to attain something we value or to avoid acknowledging something with which we can't live. We may lie by keeping silent or by repeating the lies of others thus perpetuating them. Indeed lying is so widespread
as to hardly be worthy of notice in spite of its toxically corrosive effects, except for those who know that even if they don't always speak the truth themselves, in their hearts there is Truth and that they are compelled to keep faith with that Truth for their own salvation and that of humankind.

The only time Americans have ever found themselves in the same position as the people of Naples in 1946 was 150 years ago in the wake of the Civil War. Throughout the South were burnt and blasted cities and small knots of
people sharing a struggle to explain what had befallen them and to keep themselves and each other alive. Famously, Americans don't have much patience for history, their own or anyone else's, and I feared that for a contemporary New York audience events a century and half old would be as impersonal and distant as those in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. I hoped that the people of New York, having recently experienced the dislocation to their lives of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, might recall the horrific images they saw over and over of the effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

Born Liars begins there and then, in the Superdome as Katrina is about to release it full fury. People are terrified and threatening to turn on each other in an ugly mob. Frank Carruthers attempts to defuse the situation by reminding them of the resilient people from whom they are descended through telling a story, as best he remembers it, from his own family in the days following the Civil War. With that we are transported back in time to December of 1865 and Frank's vaguely recalled family story comes to life with all the details which Frank doesn't remember or which had gotten lost along the way in the retelling over the years. It is Eduardo's genius that in conveying his powerful moral message, he nonetheless was determined to give the sorely beset people of Naples a precious gift of respite: a lovely, light cannoli of a frothy romantic comedy.

To contemporary New Yorkers who have never experienced destruction and carnage on that scale, I wanted to give a similar present. Please enjoy Born Liars.

BORN LIARS

WHEN:
World Premiere: May 27 - June 14, 2014
Wed - Sat at 8:00 p.m. | Sat & Sun at 2:00 p.m.

WHERE:
June Havoc Theatre
312 W. 36th Street, 1st Floor, NYC

WHAT:
BORN LIARS – A Romantic Comedy
In a world that has had all its rules blown away about how people are meant to act with one another across class, race and gender lines, every character but one lies to themselves and each other and the lies grow comically complicated, but in the end there is Truth in some of the hearts of these people which must and will be followed...

WHERE TO BUY TICKETS:
www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showcode=bor067