L’Anno Zero della Commedia Nuova in scena: Rocco Mortelliti e il coraggio scenico delle maschere di Lipari (1979). Intervista a Rocco Mortelliti, attore.

This interview with actor Rocco Mortelliti chronicles the scenic resurrection of Menander’s New Comedy, culminating in the first modern staging of Samia (The Woman of Samos) in 1979 in Lipari. The event symbolizes an extraordinary convergence between papyrological philology (with the discovery of Menander’s papyri) and archaeology (with the exceptional corpus of terracotta mask miniatures found in the Lipari necropolis). The performance, directed by Mario Prosperi and organized as part of an INDA Convention, was the first opportunity to scenically apply classical physiognomies, recreating 16 oversized masks based on local archaeological finds by mask-maker Silvio Merlino. Mortelliti, a student at the Silvio d’Amico Academy, testifies to the pioneering and purely empirical work on using the full-head mask (maschera a calotta). The actor had to ingeniously adapt the masks to his face (using sponge and elastic) and developed an essential, powerful, and stylized body language to give apparent expression and mobility to otherwise fixed faces. This stage practice established the primacy of the character over the interpreter’s individuality. Despite its public success and subsequent international touring, the show generated a critical dialectic with the academic world, particularly with archaeologist Luigi Bernabò Brea, due to the freedom of artistic interpretation and the non-naturalistic elements of the staging. The experience proved that the Menandrian text is dramaturgically effective on stage and anticipated the current debate on the reactivation of ancient heritage, also finding a cinematic transposition in the film La strategia della maschera (The Strategy of the Mask, 1999).