Scrivere la scena: Antonio Petito e il problema dell’autorialità

Within Neapolitan theatre, between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, several generations of “actors who write” marked a number of sensational theatre seasons in which the boundary between actor and author was imperceptible. Antonio Petito is certainly an emblematic case which, within the short circuit generated between creation and interpretation, presents a series of issues that reveal a composite authorship of the scene that includes textuality, acting mastery and scenographic invention. The documents through which his work as an author can be evaluated consist essentially of his plays and a famous unfinished autobiography, of which we will attempt here to present at least the fundamental issues concerning attribution, temporal placement and, above all, the partiality of the written data, which must be inserted into a decidedly more complex authorial action. Beyond the different nature of the main documents composed by Petito, the profile of an actor emerges who writes the scene in all its coordinates and absorbs the world around him, making his production elusive in an organic sense. What remains is the certainty of vigorous writing at the service of the body in a form that, in keeping with the subversive nature of its creator, absorbs tradition and courageously betrays it, entrusting the exposed actor with the risk of the undertaking.