Word: deramo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...feast of the imagination with the technique and logic of the commedia dell'arte, Italy's native improvisational comedy. The third Gozzi production directed this year by Andrei Serban. The King Stag is a fairy tale set in the oriental kingdom of Serendippo where the good king Deramo is looking in vain for a worthy wife. His trusted but treacherous minister. Tartaglia, tries to insinuate his own daughter, Clarice, into the king's affections to distract the king from the beautiful Angela whom Tartaglia wants for himself. At the same time, the magician Duandarte, who long ago taught King Deramo...
Everything about The King Stag is enchanting. The Forest of Miracoli, where Deramo goes hunting with Tartaglia, is filled with parrots whose gorgeous plummage creates a fluttering rainbow swirling in the air. Clever back-lighting on a pale skrim projects a prancing menagerie of lions and tigers and bears. A poor of light, lit from below the stage, suggests a woodland stream around which the overhead-lighting throws a sun-dappled forest floor. The fragile nobility of the two stags, with their breathtakingly lovely coats of the palest pastel, steal the forest show...
...other hand, looks hilariously like Big Bird with a truffle-shaped head. The characters' exotic masks, with their fixed and staring eyes, give even the humans in King Stag an entrancing and surreal beauty. When the characters speak from bodies not their own, as when Tartaglia inhabits Deramo's body to deceive Angela or when Deramo assumes the shape of a ghastly, emaciated, old man, their disembodied voices are piped in, as though from another world. The actors, after the manner of Oriental drama, seem like life-sized puppets, but with the intricate gestures and fluid grace of human voice...