REVIEW: In Scena! Italian Theater Festival’s “THE GUMMY BEARS’ GREAT WAR (La grande guerra degli Orsetti Gommosi)”
“A perfect marriage of dramaturgy and design… a heart-wrenching, mouth-watering, and unforgettable theatrical experience”
THE GUMMY BEARS’ GREAT WAR (Photo Credit: Sabina Murru)
It is not often one receives an invitation to see gummy bears perform theatre– so when you do, you run.
Billed as theatre on a table for just 25 audience members per show, “The Gummy Bears’ Great War (La grande guerra degli Orsetti Gommosi)” is a mesmerizing mastery of puppet theatre being presented as part of the In Scena! Italian Theater Festival showcasing Italian ingenuity in theatricality to New York audiences. The categorization of puppet theatre is entirely my own and in fact not mentioned in any formal descriptions of the work; defined by the human manipulation of inanimate objects, often resembling some type of human or animal figure, the genre fits snugly around the parameters of the piece, inviting an intriguing dialogue between performer, design, and audience around dramaturgical intent and the viewer’s (I’m sorry, not literal) consumption of the chosen storytelling medium.
In the play, written & directed by auteur Angelo Trofa (a pupil of the Italian theater avant-garde and founder of the Batisfera theater company), the nation of the Gummy Bears awakens from its peaceful status one warm morning like any other to a sudden call to action; they are going to attack the neighboring nation of the Dinosaurs. Grappling with certain doom, the army of the Orsetti Gommosi stands firm, queues up, and soldiers on in a story of life and death, hope and disappointment, and surprisingly existential empathy.
To cover and personalize a large topic such as war, particularly depicting bleak odds and the inner thoughts of soon-to-be casualties and corpses, the use of personifying such cute inanimate objects proves invaluable, stirring immediate empathy through absurdity and humor that bonds the audience to the emotional journey of our small heroes in an unexpectedly candid and existential thirty minute performance. Visually, puppet theatre cues to audience members that the suspension of disbelief is quick and easy; when we see something that we know is not real, we kind of play into that game in the same way we did when we were children with toys and dolls– it’s an immediate callback to a psychology latent within us. In the US, perhaps for this reason, there is a focus on puppetry as an educational practice to connect to our literal or inner child. Countless literature extolls the virtues of puppetry for childhood development, noting such virtues as puppets can act as role models for behavior and emotional regulation, and they can boost communication skills through structured verbal and non-verbal play pattern possibilities. One only has to look as far as the Muppets, Sesame Street, and “The Lion King” to get a sense of the lop-sidedly infantile demographic Americans associate with puppet storytelling.
Theatrical puppet practices from around the world, far older than ours, however, master a deeper understanding of the connection between the inanimate and the human body, concocting huge, brave worlds through perfect marriages of dramaturgy and design. “The Gummy Bears’ Great War” takes its place alongside a parade of recent New York presentations of foreign puppetry genius including Norwegian Plexus Polaire’s “Moby Dick”, Norwegian Wakka Wakka’s “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl,” and HERE’s “Puppetopia” including works of Puerto Rican, Korean, and Japanese collaboration.
“The Gummy Bears’ Great War” excels on an emotional, psychological, and physical level rooted in the use of the Orsetti Gommosi to represent and stage the Other, in this case the underdog of an unequal, racially divided war. Such dramatizations of alterity routinely involve exotification, exaggeration, and caricature, here found in the use of candies and dinosaur figurines playing against each other on a table as if the horrors of war-time summons and bureaucracy were mere child’s play. The transformative capacities of using objects to perform allows the human practitioner to enact anybody, or in this case anything, allowing for play with identities different from their own. Actors Valentina Fadda & Leonardo Tomasi wield a plethora of inanimate objects with amazing tenacity and dexterity, seamlessly transitioning from the victims to the vicious. The protective distance of projecting onto a non-human Other allows for these versatile actors to imagine and achieve an exotic fantasy world built and destroyed before our eyes. But the use of puppetry also allows for the psychological playing with and resisting of ethnic and racial identifications and categories, literally toying with visual representations of two separate races in an accessible, and for Americans perhaps unexpectedly intellectual, format.
Despite being written many years ago, the piece harkens immediate comparisons to the current war in Ukraine, but its nondescript permeability of time and place is precisely what makes the piece a triumph of poignant commentary on humanity’s unrelenting capacity for war and self-destruction. Despite a candidly pessimistic narration by Nunzio Caponio and Michela Atzeni from the outset, we follow and become endeared to Trofa’s impossible and improbable gummy heroes, cheering on the likes of Lemon Yellow, Apple Green, Raspberry Red, Ruby Red, Dirty White, and many more as they face the hard day ahead of them preparing for battle (Bears’ Casting by Simona Passi). Trofa’s script is lined with the juxtaposition of dead-pan absurdity (“the fruity aroma of the battlefield”), with moments of strobe & perfectly timed Tchaikovsky (sound design by Quarantacinque Audiolibri) illustrating high stakes with comedic effect. On the other side of the table, literally, the nation of the Dinosaurs receives the threat of war with a hearty laugh. Through a foliage-lined set-up in stark contrast to the bare-bones (bear bones?), lamp-lit gummy bear nation of individuals, the Dinosaurs are depicted as cog-in-the-machine government workers personifying the absurdity and buffoonery of bureaucratic evolution. Lighting design by Luca Carta further plays with the literally and figuratively shady dealings of war, evoking feelings of trepidation and impending doom through the strategic deployment of silhouettes and shadows throughout the tightly-focused table-stage.
While there is purposefully no telling who wins, as the show reaches an unresolved, Godotian climax, “The Gummy Bears’ Great War” leaves you with a heart-wrenching, mouth-watering, and unforgettable theatrical experience.
Production credits
“THE GUMMY BEARS’ GREAT WAR (La grande guerra degli Orsetti Gommosi)”
Written & Directed by Angelo Trofa
Performed by Valentina Fadda & Leonardo Tomasi
Voice off by Nunzio Caponio
Voice over Michela Atzeni
Sound design Quarantacinque Audiolibri
Light design by Luca Carta
Bears’ Casting by Simona Passi
Photos by Sabina Murru
Presented by Batisfera
English translation is provided by Conner Drennan
English surtitles are provided for In Scena! Italian Theater
Festival NY by Donatella Codonesu
Performed in Italian with English supertitles. Performances ran May 10, 2023 at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU, and May 13 at Culture Lab LIC, Queens, NY. The performance runs approximately 30 minutes, no intermission. For more information visit