REPORT ON FRANCESCA’S SKIT “THE ESSENCE OF AMUSEMENT”

Francesca’s skit “the essence of amusement” tried to interpret the clash between the American and the Italian cultures concerning the value of family. The aim was to make the American Trinity College students feel and enter our value through the representation of the skit itself. After the performance, a few American spectators were interviewed in order to find out what effects it had on them.

The scene is set in a shared flat and the people on the stage are three students in Rome, two Italians with an American roommate. It is a Sunday morning and as they wake up, they discuss what to do during the day. They propose very different solutions, which reflect their point of view concerning the value of family. In fact Heather, the American girl from Los Angeles, is totally astonished to hear the two Italians talking about going to see their families. She cannot believe they find it “amusing” to spend the day with their families. They start to discuss and in the end they manage to convince the American to go with them.

The way they try to get her to go with them to their family’s place is quite logical, they support their ideas through clear, reasonable arguments, even using a metaphor to make her understand what they feel like about their families. Was this strategy successful in order to really get Heather to enter their world and, therefore, to make the American audience understand and, especially, share what they feel? Starting with Heather herself, we can say that even on the fictional level, she accepts to try to be part of their world, but she is definitely not so much into it yet. In fact, in the end she decides to join them, but it still sounds like an attempt, and not a value she seems to have interiorized. The message sounds like “OK, I’ll give it a try, but I would rather go out and have fun in a much different way!”. However, even though talking and reasoning are not the best strategies to allow someone to feel a certain value and to be part of it, certainly experience plays an important role in it. If they manage to convince her to experience the atmosphere at home they love so much, they are already half the way. In fact, once Heather has felt it directly, without any intermediary, in some ways she will probably be a different person and she will contribute to the construction of that “third space” in which the participants willingly renounce to stick to their background values and actively take part in the formulation of a new value, accordingly with the other part. That is why experience has such an important role in intercultural mediation: even though Martina and Cinzia did not succeed in making Heather change by their talking, they managed to convince her to join them, and this is the first important step one can do in order to enter the other’s world.

This is the problem Francesca should have dealt with: in fact the American students we interviewed after the sketch did seem to understand the Italian value (especially because they all live in Italy at the moment and therefore they are much into our culture), but did not manage to go far beyond the “understanding-point”. In fact understanding represents a mere starting-point from which you have to develop a real “empathetic sharing”. They seemed to live the same process Heather experienced on the stage: a first phase of understanding, to which a sharing and constructive stage should have followed. That is what Francesca did not represent, so that she left Heather (and with her all the other American spectators) half the way in the process. In fact, listening to their reactions straight after the rehearsal, what they all said was just “You did a good job, we understand your value, but we are just different. You, Italian people see family in a totally different way from us, we do not say that is good or bad, it is just different”. This was on a general level their response to the activity, whereas the aim was to make them feel our concept of family in a positive way and to be willing to be part of it. Instead we failed in presenting it to them as an “attractive” alternative, worth experiencing. If they had really felt it, they would have been willing to take part in our world and share a typical Italian Sunday eating a lot surrounded by the people you love.

In order to achieve that, Francesca should have gone beyond the level of reasoning, and should have performed a “to be continued” part, where to represent the girls having lunch all together with Martina’s family. In that case, Heather, and with her all the American audience, would have directly experienced what family actually means to Italian people, therefore they would have not only “understood” our point of view, but they would have sincerely and genuinely appreciated it, and felt a small stronger Italian side inside them.

As we mentioned before, sharing someone’s value and culture is not a matter of understanding, and that is why, for this purpose, logical reasoning cannot work. Entering a culture is a matter of direct experience and feeling, and this is what the sketch should have provided the audience with: a remarkable impression about what family means for us, with the picturesque image of a stereotypical-Italian family presented with all its funny and hilarious connotations.