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Inaugural performance Other Pathways 2025-2026
Christmas in the Cupiello House
with Luca Saccoia
Thursday, December 4 at the Social Theater
The Donizetti Theater Foundation’s Season of Theaters begins again, offering numerous events in the vein of drama, music and opera until May. It begins with Altri Percorsi, an open window on the different facets of theatrical expressiveness, whose 2025-2026 edition is symbolically dedicated to Benvenuto Cuminetti, who was the enlightened inventor of the review.
The first of seven titles on the bill, scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 4 at 8:30 p.m. at the Social Theater, is Natale in casa Cupiello, Eduardo De Filippo ‘s classic revived by Luca Saccoia in a special version, cum figuris. In fact, the show sees the actor interacting with seven puppets made by set designer
The show, faithful to Eduardo’s text, evokes the events of the Cupiello family, opening a rift within the imagination and memory of every spectator. A dream that comes to life through figure theater in which Luca Saccoia immerses himself by re-emerging as “Tommasino” who, after saying the fateful “yes” to his father, relives and revives that “Christmas” that has been with us for 90 years.
Says director Lello Serao in his notes presenting the play, “The project is the brainchild of Luca Saccoia and Vincenzo Ambrosino, which took shape from a meeting with myself and set designer Tiziano Fario. The nativity scene is the horizon within which the whole work moves in both a real and metaphorical sense; the nativity scene is the element Luca Cupiello needs in order to hope for a renewed and conflict-free humanity, but it is also the representation of birth and death, it is the time of transition from the old to the new, it is the mixture of past and present, it is an established iconography and at the same time to be continuously deconstructed. The Nativity scene is remade every year, it is cyclical like the seasons, it can be liked and disliked. It is precisely from this last statement that we started: what has become of that Tommasino, “Nennillo,” as his mother calls him, considering him an eternal child? How did he transform after that fateful “yes” on his father’s deathbed? We have tried to flesh out these answers by imagining that Tommasino said that “yes” convinced, that from then on, there had to be a change, thinking that it was not just a way of pleasing his dying father, but that it was the beginning of a new path, of a birth, just as the Nativity story tells. Here then is Tommasino making himself an interpreter in his own way of a tradition, here he is a witness to a ritual and a re-enactment of comic and tragic family facts and events that have marked his life and that of those who take part in the performance. To do so, to make the ritual repeatable, Tommasino uses puppets, figures that are reanimated within his dreams/nightmares, which keep resurfacing every year like the Nativity and its shepherds. He lets himself be surprised once again by the stories they tell, takes part in them, provides them with the jokes, rekindles Luca Cupiello’s dream of smoothing out conflicts through the ritual of the Nativity.”
Luca Saccoia is an actor and director, born in 1975 in Naples. Self-taught, he loves to search for his own style like a traveler and that is by planting tents and not roots. He divides his activity between theater cinema and TV. He has collaborated with the San Carlo Theater in Naples as a reciting voice and solo singer for projects related to young pupils of primary I and II grade schools. After working for many years in some of Italy’s major theater companies, he founded with other friends and colleagues the association Nerosesamo in 2008 with the precise aim of “making mistakes on his own” both in theater and for the audiovisual sector. With his shows he gets excellent feedback from both critics and audiences, but he continues to “cry for help” through work, study, and the search for beauty and poetry.
