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Jennifer's Five Roses is Annibale Ruccello's first text. Written quickly, in little more than fifteen days on his return from a short vacation, his character had voice, words, gestures. He staged it in 1980, an almost clandestine show, but one that was able to win over audiences by word of mouth that made him an immediate "successful young author." Ruccello was born to Castellammare di Stabia in 1956. Studies in anthropology, a college degree, and friendship with Roberto De Simone and Annabella Rossi shaped his mood and interests. He put himself on stage not without tragic irony. A black petticoat, veiled stockings and a lot of anxiety about the lonely and desperate wait for Jennifer, a transvestite hiding in a small apartment in the "Spanish Neighborhoods." Six years later Ruccello reworked to that text of his by shifting the setting to the residential neighborhood of a pretentious suburb, desperate for loneliness and terrorized by the incursions of a persecuting maniac. Truths and dreams blurred in the lucid tale of one who has no more space or words to "wait" for an arrival that can warm the heart. Jennifer and the wrong phone calls in obsessive repetition. Jennifer and the incursions of a neighbor to create the fierce nightmare. Jennifer and the discovery of an impossible splitting to weld. Jennifer, drama and irony at the tip of the pen. As intended by Annibale Ruccello's fierce writing, capable of being fodder for the many actors who have loved her, succeeding to to give "her" Jennifer such different bodies, anxieties and psychologies, until to making her a great "classic character."
Giulio Baffi
"Transvestite" is a very precise word and indicates, as a noun, "the male homosexual who dresses from woman and sometimes prostitutes himself" and as an adjective or past participle of the verb "to disguise" "one who hides his true nature by assuming ideas and attitudes profoundly different from his own." Here we see that being an actor as having assumed or pretended female identity implies a process that has already taken place of moral and physical "disguise." The transvestite is a boundary creature, a "deported figure" as Ruccello defines his characters, he is not a transsexual, he has not taken the great leap, he lives his condition generally in a painful and however hyperbolic way, touching the extremes of depression and euphoria, a wonderful, fragile, delicate creature, to sometimes violent but always marginalized.
So we chose a very realistic basic connotation; the house, the little things that surround us, the fetishes, the soundtrack, the foods we cook, the smells we smell. On this basis Jennifer and Anna, have taken us into Annibale Ruccello's universe that from the wonder of a horrid everyday life throws you into an expressionist condition of great despair, interspersed from a few moments of euphoria.
As Hannibal intended, the interpretive process, in this case, should not be estrangement; it is not the actor joking about Jennifer, it is Jennifer looking at herself. And at the end of our performance, in front of her "dressing table" taking off her makeup, Jennifer is stripped of her cross-dressing condition (and the actor playing her at the same instant detaches himself from her) but for her there is no life beyond that detachment since, and this is the profound difference, that fiction of hers is her truth, the only one possible.
Geppy Gleijeses
by Annibale Ruccello
directed by Geppy Gleijeses
with Geppy Gleijeses, Lorenzo Gleijeses
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**Nunzia Schiano **voice on the radio.
Gino Curcione voice of transvestite
**Mimmo Mignemi **voice of Annunziata
**Myriam Lattanzio **radio journal entry.
scenes Paolo Calafiore
costumes Ludovica Pagano Leonetti
lights Luigi Ascione
soundtrack to by Matteo D'Amico
assistant director Roberta Lucca
Cris Baron tricks
wigs** Francesco Pogoretti**
stage director** Francesco Grieco**
chief machinist** Gennaro Iengo**
chief electrician Luigi Luongo
head seamstress** Rosa Perillo**
press office Paola Rotunno
executive production and distribution **Mariangela De Riccardis **.
production
**GITIESSE Reunited Artists**
live from **Geppy Gleijeses **
and Quirino Theater
He debuted to 17 together to Mario Scarpetta in Aristophanes' Nuvole. In '74 Eduardo wants him to play his role in Il figlio di Pulcinella directed by Bogdan Jerković for the Parma Collective. In '75 he asks Eduardo to play and direct Chi è cchiù felice 'e me? and Gennariniello. In '78 he founds with other young people the cooperative Napoli Nuova 77. He writes with Marco Mete, directs and stages Ammore e Cummedia; wins the Idi prize as an author. In '80 he writes Pupella Maggio, becoming Italy's youngest playwright, with Salvatore Di Giacomo's Il voto, directed by Virginio Puecher. In '83 he founded Gitiesse, his current production company, and with Alida Valli and Marina Malfatti the following year he performed Albert Camus' Il Malinteso, directed by Sandro Sequi. Also in '83 Strehler called him to cast Trinculo in The Tempest, but Gleijeses was forced to to refuse because he was busy filming Il caso Ettore Grande for Rai Uno in the title role, directed from Riccardo Tortora and Marisa Malfatti. In '86 he founded and directed the Teatro Acacia to Naples, in '93 he became director and administrator of the Teatro Nazionale in Milan, in '99 he founded the Teatro Stabile di Calabria, in 2003 he took over the direction of the reopened Teatro Cilea in Reggio Calabria, in 2009 he won the European call for tenders issued by Eti to award the Teatro Quirino Vittorio Gassman, which with him became the first Italian theater equipped with Bistrot, Library, cinemino, and is increasingly the first teatro romano in its segment in terms of number of spectators and subscribers. He works in film and television with Giancarlo Cobelli, Luca De Filippo, Luigi De Filippo, the Taviani brothers, Alberto Sordi, Cristian De Sica, Ugo Tognazzi, Lilla Brignone, Massimo Ranieri, Peppino Patroni Griffi, Toni Servillo, Isa Danieli, Massimo Girotti, Remo Girone... In cinema, his various performances include the young protagonist in _Così parlò Bellavista _by Luciano De Crescenzo, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Il sole anche di notte and Toni Servillo's antagonist in _Gorbaciof _by Stefano Incerti. Directors who have directed him in the theater include Luigi Squarzina, Mario Monicelli, Roberto Guicciardini, Mario Missiroli, Gigi Proietti, Vittorio Caprioli, Armando Pugliese, Antonio Calenda, Andrèe Ruth Shammah, Egisto Marcucci, Alfredo Arias, Liliana Cavani...
Debuted in theater in '90 with his father Geppy. He works with directors Squarzina, Pugliese, Guicciardini. For the cinema: in 2000 he stars in the film _Gabriele _and in 2009 in Vallanzasca, gli angeli del male, directed by Michele Placido; he co-stars in the film Iago; he is in Il giovane favoloso by Mario Martone, and in _I due soldati _by Marco Tullio Giordana. From 2000 to 2004 he works with Lindsay Kemp, Eimuntas Nekrosius, Yoshi Oida, Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski's Workcenter, Augusto Omolù, Michele Di Stefano/mk. In 2004 he is Romeo in Romeo and Juliet directed from Nikolaj Karpov. Since 2001 he has been a student of Julia Varley; together they create the play Il figlio di Gertrude, Ubu Prize 2006. In 2007 he is Enrico V in Falstaff, directed by Martone, and collaborates with Egumteatro for the show Che Tragedia! In 2008, with Julia Varley, he produces _L'esausto o il profondo azzurro _and is Luigi in Ditegli sempre di sì by Eduardo De Filippo, directed by Geppy Gleijeses. In 2009 he is Orestes in Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauride and in 2011-2012 he is Kleist's Prince of Homburg, both directed by Cesare Lievi; he signs the direction for Napoli Teatro Festival Italia of to portrait of the artist as to young man. In 2012 he collaborates with Rafael Spregelburd for SPAM, is Chekhov's Zio Vanja , collaborates with Fanny & Alexander on the project Public Speeches. In 2013 he is Buchner's Woyzek, directed by E. Bronzino. In 2014 he stars in Us-Tennis as a religious experience by Fanny & Alexander, loosely based on Agassi's Open. In 2015 he works with Alfredo Arias on the reinterpretation of the classic masks of the Commedia dell'Arte (Harlequin and Brighella) for Goldoni's play Il Bugiardo. In 2016 he presented at the Napoli Teatro Festival 58th Parallel North based on the Kafkaesque universe entitled Una giornata qualunque by dancer Gregorio Samsa, dramaturgy and direction by Eugenio Barba, Lorenzo Gleijeses and Julia Varley. In 2017 he is Leonce in Leonce and Lena, directed by Cesare Lievi.