There is a sly strategy to the fanciful title of this solo play, as there is to performer Paula Pizzi’s soft-spoken lyricism. They make it easier, for one, to take in the underlying horror. “How to Eat An Orange” does indeed begin with Pizzi sitting at a table slicing into an orange with a knife and fork, but it winds up telling the fascinating true story of Claudia Bernardi’s life’s work, using her practical skills as a visual artist to excavate some justice and beauty in the face of mass murder.
Her activism began when, after getting an MFA from Berkeley, she returned to her native Argentina to volunteer with the forensic anthropology team that was locating and identifying the bodies of the Argentines who had been “disappeared” during the country’s military dictatorship. The team expanded their work to the sites of massacres in other countries. In El Salvador, after Bernardi helped exhume and examine the bones of the victims of the infamous massacre at El Mozote, she oversaw the creation of a mural created by surviving children from the area – which became the template for her future artistic endeavors. She worked on a similar mural for contiguous Protestant and Catholic schools in Belfast, Northern Ireland, also creating there a “mural of voices” in collaboration with playwright Catherine Filloux. Filloux, the author of “Lemkin House” (about the lawyer who coined the word genocide) and other plays that address human rights, had also been traveling for decades to conflict areas to fuel her artistic work. The two women apparently hit it off.
“Catherine is fascinated by the way I eat an orange, and says she wants to write a one person play about me,” Pizzi as Bernardi says in Filloux’s resulting play, “How To Eat An Orange.” (This fascination with Argentines’ use of a knife and fork, rather than just their hands, starts to feel like a metaphor for art.)
Much of Filloux’s play is taken up with Bernardi’s childhood in Argentina, and her relationship with her younger sister. They are two curious children, who eat begonias and create tiny furniture for the ants in their backyard. Their idyll is cut short, when they are orphaned as teenagers, and live through the constant quiet terror of life under an authoritarian regime. It’s her sister Patri who co-founds The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. Pizzi as Bernardi tells the stories of some of the slain women they identify.
“How to Eat an Orange” can feel imbalanced in several ways. It offers too much about Bernardi’s childhood and too little about her work. Pizzi’s unwaveringly gentle delivery can certainly feel jarring given the ugliness of the worst stories. And the production at times seems over-designed, with projections threatening to upstage the actress – although there are moments when the designers are effective in capturing a sense of dread, such as when Pizzi slides open and closed a plastic curtain that evokes an autopsy room (and perhaps as well a torture chamber.) In general, the show might strike some as too artful.
Eventually, though, it occurred to me that the largely lyrical tone of “How to Eat An Orange” might be a deliberate act of defiance, as if to say: This is art, and art is beautiful. We will not let the world’s horrors push aside the world’s beauty.
How To Eat An Orange
La MaMa through June 16
Running time: About 90 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: Adults: $30. Students/Seniors: $25
Written by Catherine Filloux
Directed by Elena Araoz
Cast: Paula Pizzi.
Set and Prop Design by Daniel Landez; Projection Design by Milton Cordero; Lighting Design by Maria-Cristina Fusté; Sound Design by Nathan Leigh; Co-Costume Design by Suttirat Larlarb and Brynne Oster-Bainnson; Stage Manager Milan Eldridge;
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