Taking the stage away, an Interview with Massimo Sgorbani

Playwright and screenwriter Massimo Sgorbani graduated in dramaturgy from the Paolo Grassi Civic School. In theater, he has collaborated with actors such as Franco Branciaroli, Antonino Iuorio, Ivana Monti, Sabrina Colle, Patrizia De Clara, Lucia Ragni, Ruggero Cara, and Federica Fracassi. In 2001, he won the Special Jury Prize at the Riccione Awards “Bignami-Quondamatteo” for his play Angelo della gravità (Angel of Gravity). In 2003, he placed second at the Fersen Prize for his play Il tempo ad Hanoi (Time in Hanoi). That same year, he received an honorable mention for continuity at the Riccione Prize for his play Le cose sottili nell’aria (The Subtle Things in the Air). In August 2008, he was awarded the Franco Enriquez Prize for Dramaturgy.
In May 2008, the Teatro Franco Parenti organized a “Focus on an Author: Massimo Sgorbani,” a ten-day event during which seven of his plays were staged under the direction of Andrée Ruth Shammah. In March 2013, his play Blondi premiered at the Piccolo Teatro Studio in Milan. Sgorbani’s works have been published by Ubulibri under the title Teatro di Massimo Sgorbani (Theater of Massimo Sgorbani) and by Editoria&Spettacolo as Due pezzi quasi comici (Two Almost Comic Pieces).

Last February, the Spazio Avirex Tertulliano hosted Lo soffia il cielo. Un atto d’amore (The Sky Blows It. An Act of Love), a performance born from two of your texts (Angelo della gravità and Le cose sottili dell’aria). The protagonists are a mother and son who communicate through two intertwined monologues—"she, shut indoors and addicted to TV; he, considered strange and struggling with relationships." This device reflects a recurring trait in your work. You’ve almost always written monologues, particularly ones where the speaker doesn’t aim to explain their actions or seek the audience’s understanding. Your use of this narrative mode seems more like an acknowledgment of language’s stickiness, of words that always say something else, of a thought that strains and is never fully complete or logical.

In reality, when you do this kind of work—let’s call it that—theorizing comes after practice. There was no deliberate choice steering me toward monologues over dialogue. Over time, I simply realized that I enjoyed it, and perhaps I was better at it.

At first, colleagues urged me to write differently, saying theater harbors a certain distrust of monologues. I almost felt guilty: “I must write a text for at least two or three characters,” I told myself. Then you read Thomas Bernhard and realize you’re dealing with a writer of monologues even when his plays feature multiple characters. It’s an attitude independent of any theoretical justification, though over time, it was inevitable that I’d ask myself questions and reflect on this inclination.

First, we need to agree on what a monologue is, as a category that includes others. There’s the monologue as a convention—a character speaking alone, to themselves. Often, though, the monologue takes different forms, like a dialogue with an unseen character. This is the case, for example, in my latest work on Truman Capote. Capote speaks with an invisible character who remains unknown for half the play. So it’s not a monologue in the conventional sense. In my earlier works—up to Innamorate dello spavento—I relied on the so-called “interior monologue,” a stream of thoughts where it no longer matters whether you’re speaking to yourself or someone else.

I was interested in giving voice to that stream of thought because it’s another world. It’s an interiority that somehow comes to light. A subject speaking outside dramatic action, where it’s clear that dramatic action, when it exists, dominates the stage and forces characters to reveal themselves within that action, that situation, and its development in relation to others.

Instinctively, we associate monologues with strong stillness. The body seems motionless, though that’s not true. It’s the words that dictate movement, that move the scene.

It’s not always like that—it depends on the director. For example, my most fruitful collaboration, without taking away from others, has been with Teatro i. I find it’s the only Milanese theater truly engaged in research, with admirable coherence and courage.

With Teatro i, I worked on the three texts of Innamorate dello spavento, and within the monologue structure, an enormous theatricality emerged—not stillness. Directing is interpreted as a scenic counterpart to the text: just as the monologue’s writing contains a world, on stage, another can be recreated. If you read the text of my monologues, you’ll notice the absence of stage directions: what should I add in bringing a character’s inner world to light? That world is already full of possible actions. In the first version of Angelo della gravità at the 2004 Asti Festival, for example, Franco Branciaroli moved a lot: first on a trampoline, then to the fridge, then climbing onto a giant cake—none of which were indicated in the stage directions. I think, in this sense, with this type of monologue, a director has great freedom.

Innamorate dello spavento consists of three texts depicting Hitler’s final months through his relationships with his German shepherd, Eva Braun, and Magda Goebbels. Although it’s a trilogy, Blondi and Eva seem destined to form a perfect pair. In terms of coherence, tone, and structure (the two protagonists constantly use the same words, are driven by the same desires, and each longs to be the other). Where does Magda’s eccentricity come from, and how do you distinguish the three characters in their relationship with the Führer?

I started by writing Blondi because I wanted to tell Hitler’s story from his dog’s perspective and, indirectly, Nazism—or at least a part of it. At that point, I gave the text to Federica Fracassi, and the desire arose to explore the other women who loved Hitler. In reality, there were more than three, but three died in the bunker with him. Besides Blondi and, of course, Eva Braun, there was Magda Goebbels to complete the trilogy. For her, I initially thought of using the same monologue structure as the previous two chapters, but it didn’t work. I discussed it with Federica and Renzo (Martinelli): in Magda Goebbels, there’s too much tragedy; there’s Medea.

I went back to read Medea and all the Medeas that followed. This woman who kills her children… I couldn’t get past it. I couldn’t grasp her. There was no room, not for comedy, but for play. At that point, I imagined her interacting with Hitler, complicating things further: how to represent Hitler? The idea came while talking on the phone with Renzo Martinelli: “To give Hitler a voice, we’d have to make him talk about something completely different,” I said. “I don’t know, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck.” I threw it out as a paradox, but then I stopped and thought it might work, especially since it’s documented that Hitler was passionate about Disney cartoons and owned a personal copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. From there, I found a real hook, not just anecdotal, because it reveals not so much the “monster’s” childish side but Hitler’s attention to propaganda. He understood that the language of cartoons lent itself easily to communication, so much so that he commissioned a short Disney-style cartoon, a kind of promotional spot, advocating for the purchase and spread of radios—an essential tool for the Führer’s voice to enter every German home. It’s the beginning of propaganda, which is partly an invention of fascism…

In the end, the chapter on Magda resolved into a two-person dialogue, but the references to the other texts remained. Blondi’s presence, for example, is always evoked, and the interlocking scenes that characterize the relationship between the two earlier monologues remain.

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