Text by Laura Zangarini

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The oldest mention of epilepsy is found in a Babylonian medical text preserved in the British Museum in London. It describes the disease and the various types of seizures, associating each with the name of a spirit or god. Etymologically, the term "epilepsy" is derived from the Greek verb epilambanus, meaning "to take by surprise" with obvious reference to the inexplicability and unpredictability of its manifestations: sudden loss of consciousness, stiffening of the body, stopping of breathing, cyanosis, frothing at the mouth. Characteristics for which epilepsy, until to recent times, has been regarded as a "sacred disease."

Entirely scattered with epileptic accesses is Il Male Sacro by Massimo Binazzi (1922 - 1983), Umbrian playwright and theater director, in whose opera stumbled Antonio Latella, a director, playwright and pedagogue of European renown, a stubborn and dreamy artist, chose as the third-year acting essay of the First Level Academic Diploma of the Silvio D'Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art. The play makes its national premiere as part of the 66th Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto (Teatrino delle Sei, July 7 - 9).

After a year of voluntary absence from the stage, says the 1967-born director, "my idea was to return to to work for a while on Italians, from the most famous to the lesser-known, both in institutional and pedagogical settings, such as the Academy. I met The Sacred Evil many years ago in the library of the Stabile dell'Umbria, from to which I had been called to work on Shakespeare's "Tempest" (2003/2004). It electrocuted me. I kept it to long in the drawer, the times I tried to to propose the project was rejected. Binazzi is an unjustly forgotten, almost unknown playwright. His writing is feverish, dense, to sometimes baroque, calling to the great Italian authors. A playwright outside the circuits of that period, therefore probably without support from theaters or critics."

Born from a long and passionate stay of Binazzi in Calabria, the 'opera was announced in a playbill of Milan's Piccolo Teatro, which later gave it up. Set between the Ionian Sea and the mountains, it takes us to home to the Morace family: the head of the family Pietro, his wife Kyria, daughters Xenio, Rosaria and Mara, and son Alex. But to "electrocuting" Latella, the director himself explains, "was Binazzi's particular writing, which to reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez and his magical universes. Although the Morace family is from Calabria, Il Male Sacro rewrites in some ways a Greek tragedy, which leads back to the theme to dear to me of the Atrides: a father-Agamemnon (Peter), a foreign wife (Kyria is Greek, she comes from Crete, whose only name, writes writer and literary critic Ruggero Jacobbi in the book's preface, "carries (...) like a wind of sorcerous freedom"), a daughter reminiscent of Electra (Mara), the son a sacrificed Orestes. A Hellenic Calabria in which first fascism and then World War II appear, where everything starts from the end and is remembered."

Latella calls The Sacred Evil a "hermaphroditic" text (he reminds Mara to the crowned servant in the opening lines of the first of the four acts ofopera: "In the beginning God created the heavens, and Dionysus the earth. Dionysus created Calabria to his image: female and male..."). "I consider it a hermaphrodite text," the director clarifies, "because it does not have a male or female identity but possesses both male and female genitalia, thus enclosing within itself the possibility of being everything. A fascinating aspect, which allows me to cross with my young actors all theatrical languages. To travel, through memories filtered by the epilepsy of the protagonists, in a strongly hallucinated text. The "sacred evil," Latella continues, "is also the dark evil of a sick and corrupt southern Italy, a disease that assaults the earth and shakes it, makes it tremble, annihilates it by taking away civilization and incivility.

In the finale, Jacobbi writes, "everything has been said, everything has happened. Kyria kills Peter, and Mara induces-in 'sacred evil'-Alex to to kill her mother, who lies with her lover. They will both die, Electra and Orestes in one body." "It honors me," Latella reflects, "that such a complex, layered text has become to part of the Spoleto Festival's playbill, where I also curate the mentoring of two young directors, winners ex aequo of the Camilleri Prize, Marco Corsucci (who will stage "Il supermaschio") and Diego Parlanti ("Parole Morte Comunque"), whom we will also see atopera during the course of the review.

Speaking of "his" young people, Latella points out that "in this Italy that quacks even pathetically about nature and rights, I face important work with the 'fluid' generation, young people who claim the freedom to be who they are, how they want, who reject stereotypes or categories. An unimaginable achievement for those of my generation. Dealing with them on the subject of epilepsy means the possibility of being free to explore, to go into "other" areas; of not seeing the disease only as an "evil": in ancient times the epileptic was a saint."

from a pedagogical point of view, the director continues, ""creation" is something for me totally free - that is why I speak of The Sacred Evil as a hermaphrodite text, of the possibility of being everything. Binazzi came from from a very Catholic family, he himself was a profound believer: he had a hard time accepting his homosexuality, to declaring himself. to unlike "exposed" intellectuals such as Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 - 1975) and Giovanni Testori (1923 - 1993), he failed to to make his homosexuality a creative force, and this is very much felt in the text."

The Sacred Evil also deals with the taboo of incest, which makes the family "unseemly." In the night painting in the room from bed, Binazzi describes "a husband and wife bound only by sex, and then divided from a hatred that sublimates into predilections for children" (Jacobbi). "The father nurtures an incestuous feeling for Xenio, but he is also attracted to his son," Latella points out. "At the origin is his lack of identity: a gypsy mother, who hated men, probably a lesbian, who after the birth of the child, the result of violence, hangs herself. The father will recognize him because caught from a superstitious terror, more than from remorse, that the dead woman would take revenge. So Peter never had his mother. A dark evil lies at the origin of the Morace family."

In staging this feral, archaic drama, the young actors (seventeen) "all wear tutus," Latella explains, "as if they were in a circus setting. The show, divided into four pictures, is an immersion in styles of storytelling that are all different. Going through a language as evocative and full of mystery as Binazzi's means handing over to each pupil a matter from mold so that it is inhabited by being themselves living matter."