Driven to rejuvenate Pezzolo, the Sicilian community her parents once called home, Mariagrazia LaFauci founded Trinacria Theatre Company in 2016. While the company's shape has changed, its focus on community building, placemaking, and intercultural exchange has remained in a way that defies convention.
Unlike most theater companies, Trinacria doesn't perform in theaters. Instead, they've been known to take over piazzas, terraces, and even soccer fields to perform pieces rooted in tradition as well as original productions.
I had the opportunity to speak with Mariagrazia, who also serves as Trinacria Theatre Company's artistic director, to learn more about its important work and what she hopes audiences will take away.
What inspired the creation of the Trinacria Theatre Company?
In the summers, I spent most of my life going back and forth to Pezzolo because my family lived there.
Around the time I was getting ready to graduate college, I started thinking about doing a project to help the village. Sicily has gone through a real diaspora, with many people leaving and many businesses going under.
In 2008, the year I graduated high school and went to college, the last bar in Pezzolo slowly shut down, and life screeched to a halt. Nobody had a place to meet up. That kind of really important cultural community space was just gone. I saw the population plummet after that.
Then, there was a really massive storm here in 2009 that really impacted people, and actually, quite a few people died in Giampilieri Superiore, which is the next town over, and a lot of homes were destroyed.
All of that together was just terrible and devastating. When I graduated from college, I started looking for opportunities to do a fellowship or something that would let me give back to this community. In 2016, I started the theater company here in Pezzolo to do that.
How did the company evolve over the years?
It's gone through many different iterations. In 2016, it started out with just an all-volunteer cast out of Boston and New York City. I held auditions in both places and found this group of actors. We were like, "Okay, let's go do this. Let's spend four weeks in Sicily and create a piece of theater about it."
It was such a beautiful piece, called La Storia di Colapesce, based on a local myth that's really closely connected to Messina. We toured it around Sicily and brought it back to the U.S., where we did it in Boston and New York.
Then there was a year gap because I went and did my master's during that year. But when we came back, I was sort of like, "That was beautiful, but how do we expand beyond just dropping a bunch of people here, doing a show all on our own, performing it, and then leaving? How do we make this a community event and space?"
So, we started to play around with this festival format, where we did workshops and storytelling circles. We put on an exhibit by a local artist, created pieces, and featured these local theater companies. Then it was like, "Oh, there's something here."
Since then, there's been more of a festival format to it all. And so it's gone through different iterations. Sometimes, we do create shows; sometimes, we don't create shows. This year was an open residency, which we've done twice now, where we just look for artists, they apply, and then we bring them in for residency. They get to kind of use the time and the space to create on their own independently, and then they share that in the festival afterward.
Tell us where you perform.
We don't use traditional theater spaces at all. We use piazzas, streets, and abandoned spaces wherever we can find them. This year, we held events on a terrace and a soccer field.
I love theaters. I genuinely love them and will always love sitting in a seat, the lights going dark, and all the bells and whistles that come with it. But I think that space can be intimidating for people sometimes if it's not the kind of space you regularly engage with. Sometimes, it can feel a little bit like you're going into the temple or church of a religion you don't belong to, and you're kind of like, "When do I sit? When do I stand? What are the rules? What do I say?" And that feels intimidating for people.
We take it from that context and just plunk it into, "This is your piazza. If you're going to answer a phone call, your kid's going to run across the piazza, or you're talking in the corner, we can't stop you, but we will also put on a show for you. So, if you also want to sit and watch that, great." It's a very different vibe.
How does that unconventional style translate to your performances?
Necessity is the mother of invention. We've got no stage, we've got no lights, we've got no speakers, we've got nothing. How are we going to put on the most incredible show possible? So, you take a show like Colapesce, which will take place 80% underwater and also in a volcano, and all of these things that are completely impossible to stage. How are you going to do that with absolutely zero lights, sound, set, or props to indicate we're underwater? It was like, "Cool. We have our bodies and voices. We have some music that we can make using these three instruments that we brought. Let's do it. What are a million different ways that you can make someone look like they're swimming when they're not really swimming?" And so that was how our first piece was made. It's very physical, it's very playful, it's very silly at times.
How does communal living during the residency foster creativity?
The artists who come here always live together in a shared house, sometimes even shared rooms, depending on the number of people and what they've agreed to.
For me, it's two things. One is Italian households. They're intergenerational. There are often a lot of family members. I've got my aunt, who lives five minutes down the road, and I'm probably at her house eating dinner two to three times a week. Communal meal times are so important; that family connection is so important. It's part of Italian culture. It would be weird if we didn't all eat together as a company. I always make sure you're living together or sharing meals together. And then, often, what comes out of that is people who find these points of connection.
One of the other things I do as part of the residency is each artist leads a morning warmup. They get a chance to present their practice in some way. And the people who come here are some visual artists, some of them are writers, and some of them are theater majors. They all go at it from such different angles, but they get this morning of "Hey, you're going to engage with my creative practice today, and that's going to set you up for whatever it is that you're going to do for the rest of the day, or how you're thinking."
So, these really wonderful synergies come out of that often where somebody says, "What you did today really resonated with me. I didn't realize that you did that. I want that in my piece. Can you help me? Can we collaborate on this?"
These cool little collaborations naturally and organically emerge, or people just bring wild talents, and suddenly, you figure out that this person can play a kazoo in this piece.
What impact did the pandemic have on the company?
It was tough. We had decided to do the open residency for the first time that year. We'd chosen four really incredible artists, but obviously, they couldn't come to Sicily that year.
What was really miraculous was they all waited the two years that it took for us to finally be able to travel again. And so they came in 2022, which was amazing.
It was a tough year. I had been living in London up until that year. In February, I found out that we'd gotten an Arts Council England grant to do a research and development period on a show we'd been creating called the Hades & Persephone Project.
We'd gotten this amazing grant, and I had these incredible actors ready to do it. Then, the pandemic shut the whole thing down. So, I got to go back to London in 2021, and we were able to use those grant funds to do the project.
One of the really cool things that happened during the pandemic was we created an audiobook. We took the Colapesce story we created in 2016 and turned it into an audio story. We had music, and we did all the sound effects.
During the pandemic, many people said, "Oh, Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a pandemic." But I had this feeling: We have to take care of ourselves first. We can't just be creative when things are hard just because we've suddenly got time and space to do it. So, it was also important to put the brakes on and make sure that everybody was taken care of first and foremost.
How has your work bridged cultural gaps?
One of the things I am most excited about is seeing some of the folks here who really want to get involved. For example, there's this wonderful young woman who doesn't live in Pezzolo, but her grandfather, Stephano, does. Her name is Giada. Giada speaks beautiful English. She's going to go to school for translation.
She's 18 years old but is so put together, articulate, and smart. She has come in and done translations, gotten involved with the performances, and taken on many directing roles over the years. It's been cool to see her develop this way.
Her grandfather, Stefano, was an incredible artist. He works with wood. He used to work a lot with steel, but he'll find beautiful pieces of twisted olive wood, and they'll turn into an octopus lamp or something incredible like that. A lot of people in Pezzolo didn't know that he had this incredible museum of his work in his house. And so he started featuring his stuff and putting it out there during the festival.
The two of them are a really great example for me. Every year, somebody has this incredible connection with Stefano, where they wind up at his house every day working in his shop, having coffee with him, helping with a piece, and putting his stuff on display. It's this wonderful interaction.
I feel like these micro-interactions happen all over the village when we're doing this residency.
How else have you involved the community in your shows?
Whatever we do has to involve the community in some way. And so when I'm looking for artists, I'm looking for artists who have some sort of a community focus to their work. I tell them that it can be part of the process, especially for the open residency where they're creating their own pieces. It could be part of the final piece of what you perform, but in some way, you have to engage with this community and have them be a part of what you're doing, which isn't always easy. Sometimes, people just want to sit back and be audience members.
So it's about finding people like Giada and Stefano who really want to be up on the stage, in the audience, and in the crowds. Finding ways for people who don't often go to museums or theaters to feel like they can engage is such an interesting artistic challenge.
Sometimes, it can be a really low-stakes engagement. Instead of sitting back, you'll be walking around and following the narrator. Last year, the piece that we built went through the whole village. It took you through a tunnel, and there were calls and responses to it and things like that. Some of those can be really low-stakes ways to engage, and some can be really high-engagement.
We had this one incredible artist, Heloise Wilson, who is just so phenomenal. She did this whole storytelling workshop. With the stories told through that workshop, she created these beautiful little posters that were put up around town with snippets of the stories, photos, and images. Then, she created a chorale piece that members of the community performed. She crafted this beautiful Greek chorale poem using their words, and they performed it as part of the festival. They did an amazing job, and she guided and facilitated that.
Your pieces tap into folklore and mythology. Tell us about a particularly inspiring one.
My brain immediately goes to the story of Mata & Grifone, the last full theater piece we created last year. We created this piece based on the Hades & Persephone Project. The story of Hades and Persephone is the most well-known outside of Sicily, but here in Messina, Mata and Grifone is the best known.
It's the story of these two giants. Mata is a Sicilian princess, and she's white. Grifone is a Moorish conqueror, and he's black. This is set during the time when Sicily was an Arab Emirate and had been conquered by North African Islamic conquerors. And so the two of them see one another and fall in love. Her father objects, and he locks her away in a tower.
Her father would only accept it if Grifone converted to Christianity, which he did for them to be married. And so the two of them become the rulers of Messina.
They're now the pagan deities of Messina. Every summer during Ferragosto, these massive paper mâché statues of these two giants parade through the streets.
They're known as the ancestors of all Messina people because we're all said to have descended from them. They had so many kids together. I love this story so much, first of all, because it's the story of this interracial couple on an island where I think xenophobia and racism are quite present today.
Also, Sicily itself has an incredible multicultural background. It was Arab for 200 years. It's been Spanish, French, Greek, and everything in between. There are so many cultures. It's a continent and island, and that's where we come from.
At a time where now we're facing these really harsh lines drawn, politically, especially for people who are refugees or who are emigrating from the African continent into Europe through Sicily. Seeing the really beautiful presence of these two lovers, who are the ancestors of all Sicilians, reminds us that this is where we all come from.
There's a harshness to it, a difficulty to it. Grifone had to give up a part of his cultural identity and religion to be with this person. So it's complex, it's nuanced, and it's celebrated throughout Messina.
How do you ensure your productions remain authentic and respectful to other cultures?
It's always about talking to people authentically and respectfully. If it's always rooted in a truly excellent intention, "I believe that your story is worth telling, and it's worth telling with honesty, respect, and integrity."
You're always approaching it with that lens. I'm part of this group called ITDS (Indie Theatres Dismantling Supremacy). We're this cohort of artistic directors of small independent theaters that came together in 2020 to talk about how our organizations exist in a world where there's white supremacy, and there's oppression. There are all of these systematic things that we all have to deal with, and we all have to consider how they show up in the worlds where we're working.
Something about showing care and kindness to the people you're around is so simple. When you take that care and kindness and implement it into the systems you're building—because we're all building systems—to function or survive and be sustainable, we have to systematize certain things. But when that kindness and that care are embedded in you, it's a part of what you do.
I think we've never approached it without the angle of, "We do this because we love these people, and we're going to listen to these people and listen to these stories, and we want to involve you and not force you into being involved if that's not what you want." We always bring it back to kindness, which has been a much more powerful driver than I think I would've ever thought it was.
What do you hope audiences take away?
There are different parts of an audience. There's the local audience, the Pezzolo people. And I think what I really want them to leave with is, "I live in a place that is capable of producing great art and great beauty."
Every day can be activated, brought to life, and turned into something beautiful if you just apply a creative lens to it. And the place where I live is capable of being that spark and being activated into that beauty.
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