Spam

Spam – a Sprechoper by Rafael Spregelburd

Directed by Rafael Spregelburd
Performer Lorenzo Gleijeses
Original music performed live and video project Alessandro Olla
Set design Roberto Crea
Lighting designer Gigi Ascione
Choreographic movement Marco Mazzoni
Assistant director Manolo Muoio
Assistant to the director Laura Amalfi
Italian translation Manuela Cherubini
Musical creation collaboration Zypce
Set and props construction Michele Gigi
Motion graphics Elisa Marras (Multiforme)
Illustrations Valentina Olla
Press office Paola Rotunno
Production manager Luca Marengo

A project by Lorenzo Gleijeses

Produced by Fondazione Campania dei Festival – Napoli Teatro Festival Italia, Festival delle Colline Torinesi, Teatro Stabile di Calabria, Teatro a Corte, TiConZero – 2013

In collaboration with the Embassy of Argentina in Italy

Running time: 1h 30′

Born in 2010 from the encounter between one of the most important playwrights on the international stage, Rafael Spregelburd, and Italian actor and director Lorenzo Gleijeses, Spam tells the story of a university professor who, by replying to an email, slips into an extremely intricate international plot involving banks, PayPal accounts, and a murderous uncle in Kuala Lumpur. It is the darkly comic drama of a man lost in a cultural web that is as ordinary as it is absurd. It is the epic of a man suffering from temporary amnesia who attempts to reconstruct his identity from the traces left on his computer, among counterfeit Chinese dolls and James Bond’s tuxedo.

The piece consists of 31 short scenes, drawn at random by the actor and performed in a different order each time. From the fragmentation of this emotional, desperate, and comic narrative emerge the multiple interpretations that form the expressive richness of the text: behind an action built on elements of pop culture (James Bond, urban legends, karaoke, Google Translator), the audience will recognize traces of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, and Žižek.

Spam marks Spregelburd’s return to writing (after a two-year hiatus from new works) and his directorial debut on Italian stages.

The monologue is written in the form of a Sprechoper (a spoken opera) with a live musician. The ensemble composition by Alessandro Olla, in collaboration with the Argentine artist Zypce, is based on electronic experimentation and acoustic hybridization, employing unconventional instruments, industrial machine noises, documentary video, and soundscapes with varying degrees of virtuality.