Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client, produced by Italian Institute of Culture and Teatro Stabilissimo, opens March 13; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 3 pm; through April 18. Tickets: $20-$25. Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena; 323.965.9996 or 626.441.5977.
Francesca Fanti is in the middle of “the best rehearsals of my life” for the play Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client, directed by Mark Kemble at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena. The reason, she says, is Eric Murdoch, her costar from New York currently making his West Coast debut in this production.
Francesca Fanti and Eric Murdoch
“There is so much chemistry between us,” Fanti says, “that it makes it really comfortable to do this very intimate play with him.”
Fanti, who came to Los Angeles from Rome in 1995, is the quintessential Italian actress, resembling a young Anna Magnani as she waves her arms around to emphasize her enthusiasm.
“And I’m so lucky to be working again with Dacia Maraini, one of the most famous writers in Italy for the past 40 years and the most free mind on the planet,” she adds. Maraini, a prize-winning novelist and feminist theater personality, “understands the actor,” Fanti says, “and she attracts the nicest people as her associates. Her joy is contagious!”
This isn’t the first time Fanti has appeared in one of Maraini’s plays. They met at the Italian Institute of Culture here in LA when the playwright came to accept an award and Fanti expressed an interest in performing Maraini’s play Love Letters (”Lettera d’Amore”). “I first presented it as part of a larger program so I had to cut it to 15 minutes,” Fanti says with a laugh. “But she trusted me to do it! And of course I had a flood of questions so our correspondence flew back and forth. It was so wonderful talking to the writer and getting answers to all my questions.”
Love Letters, Fanti says, “is a very intense one-person show about a woman who is trying to resolve her complicated relationship with her recently deceased mother and discovers a packet of erotic love letters among her mother’s effects.” The letters in the play were real letters written in 1860 by Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio which Maraini used as the foundation for her drama.
In the 1970s, when Maraini was the companion of Italian novelist Alberto Moravia (they lived together from 1962 to 1983), she wrote Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client. “The two people in it are right there,” Fanti says. “Dacia has a deep understanding of the life of these characters and she has created them fully and completely.”
Fanti in Dialogue
In January of 2009 Maraini took her to Chieti, a small town in Italy, to perform Dialogue in a very old 400-seat theater, the Teatro Marrucino, which now serves as an opera house. And Fanti is looking forward to performing the play four or five times in Italy this summer and in Italian Institutes of Culture in cities all over the United States.
Fanti came to Los Angeles originally in 1992 to attend a seminar given by Dominic DeFazio, an acting teacher, and she later began to study with him. “He realized acting was my passion,” she says, “and he helped me to let go and open up.” She then worked with Susan Perry, a Method teacher from the Actors Studio. “I needed a tool so I embraced the Method,” Fanti notes. Finally, it was Jeff Corey, who became not only her teacher and friend, but “also a father to me.”
“With Corey I reached a different level,” she says. “I went beyond the Method and opened myself to infinite possibilities. I realized I no longer needed to work from my past experiences. He told me, ‘It’s you and you have everything there to do it with.’”
No stranger to Los Angeles audiences, Fanti appeared in 1998 in Dario Fo’s Orgasmo Adulto Escapes From the Zoo, a one-woman show written by the man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. She was then asked to do the show for one performance, on International Women’s Day, in San Francisco. But the audience was so receptive the show was extended and played for three months to sold-out houses and won her the Bay Area Critics Award for Best Solo Performance.
“I was pregnant at the time,” she says, “so one night I stuffed a big pillow under my costume and played the four different characters in the play as pregnant women, just for fun.”
She also tells of surviving every actor’s worst nightmare. “One night at the end of my first monologue in Orgasmo the lights began popping off one by one until I was standing onstage in total darkness. All the electricity went off and none of the background sound effects worked. So I offered the audience the choice of getting their money back or having me go on with the show. The audience elected to have me go on and out of 120 people only eight left. And I did the whole show with the lighting technician following me around holding a flashlight over his head.
“Actually, it worked perfectly. My next monologue was set at 5:30 in the morning so the lighting was just right,” she says. “Those are the nights the audience gives so much—almost more than you do on stage.”
After that she took time off to be with her new son, Matteo. “I loved the maternity experience,” she says, “and I didn’t want to miss one second with my baby.” In the interim she appeared in commercials for a number of car companies, Kellogg’s, Bank of America, in an Elizabeth Arden ad (with Elizabeth Taylor) and many others. And when Matteo turned four she responded to “the artist inside me” and accepted a role on the big screen, appearing with Daniel Day-Lewis, Sophia Loren, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard and Kate Hudson in Nine. Not too shabby a company to work with when you decide to resume your career!
Article and feature image by Cynthia Citron. Story images by Pina De Cola.
