“Eugenio, Alessandro and I: this is how it was born on the Novecento stage of Allegri”

In a great show by Leo De Berardinis at one point he would say, paraphrasing the De Rege – “Come on you idiot!” and he came out of the fifth Einstein who recited the formula: “E = mc2”. Einstein was Eugenio Allegri. I think he was the only actor in the world who could handle such a scene. He needed lightness, self-irony and an infallible comic time to avoid falling into the speck. And Eugenio had all this and much more.

I knew him before. Marco Paolini was already working with the Laboratorio Teatro Settimo and, together, they had put on a show which they brought to the squares on the other and narrow stage of the commedia dell’arte, “The false magnificent”: hilarious. Then Roberto Tarasco had met him in Bologna, at the school of Alessandra Galante Garrone. In 1990, when we began to fathom the classics, it was natural for Eugenio to slip into that great womb that was the Laboratorio Teatro Settimo. We began with “The story of Romeo and Juliet”, he was an angry and brutal Capulet father, but also a very tender Mercutio. Then, as was natural, Goldoni’s Trilogy of the Villeggiatura arrived and here he transformed himself into a scrounger cicibeo but also into Fulgentius, the only judicious character of the three comedies.

During rehearsals we read a friend’s book, “Oceano mare”. Alessandro Baricco came to visit us at Villa Emo, where we worked, in Veneto. One evening, after dinner, Eugenio read aloud the chapter on Bartleboom. In the end Baricco said to me: but if I write something for Eugenio, will you stage it? And «Novecento» was born. Then he became a resolute and tormented Cyrano, a grieving uncle Vanya, a stubborn and intractable rustego. But always, under each surprising transformation of him, an extraordinary empathy flowed that put him in direct communication with the public.

Eugenio, like all the actors I love to work with, was the author of his presence on stage. I didn’t follow the shows on tour, and when I happened to see them again in some square, after many reruns, my feeling was: who knows what those crazy people will have invented. He, Laura Curino, Marco Paolini, Lucilla Giagnoni, Mariella Fabbris and all the others who in recent years have allowed me to accompany them, always reinvented the show in the relationship with the public, by listening to the spectators. Eugenio was also a great pedagogue, his passion for teaching was generous. In recent years I had invited him to the theater school for actors to work on the commedia dell’arte with the boys. He arrived with his bag full of masks and for a week more than a seminar it seemed like he was having a party.

One evening, with the whole class, we went to see “Novecento”. Everyone was very impressed, especially by the storm scene on the high seas with the piano sliding into the Virginian ballroom. One of them told me: it looked like he was flying. He didn’t “seem”, I replied, he really flies. Then, in the dressing room, I told Eugenio that that scene frightened me, that now, instead of dancing it, he could well afford to tell it, to save energy: we are no longer boys! But we are always children of workers, of those suburbs that raised us and of which, stubbornly, we continue to be proud.

If he wasn’t as hard as a mule, he felt like he was stealing tickets from the spectators. This was my friend Eugenio. Last night he came to Settimo to see a show by an amateur group, because he knew that good theater can be found everywhere, he went back to that Garybaldi theater of which he was one of the symbols. He went home. I imagine him in the paradise of the actors that he tries to explain to St. Peter, or to San Totò or to San Macario, what is inside that bag. He will certainly be able to convince them to bring in his masks of the commedia dell’arte.

* Record theatrical