TRUTH IN THE TELLING
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Perhaps inspired by Calvino’s fantastic collection of Italian folktales, Transient Theatre brings us Truth in the Telling, six Italian tales linked by a new one. Ranging from light and humorous to dark and terrifying, they provide an entertaining and magical world and tell us once again how important a story can be.
Framing Derek Werner’s adaptations is a princess in the Land of Tedium who is bored and depressed. Her father, the king, tries to raise her spirits by enlisting a series of storytellers. There is El Mumbo, a pompous goofball who tells her the instructive story of the “Happy Man’s Shirt,” about a king who seeks happiness for his son. There is Neon Creon, a hippie LA storyteller who relates how Saint Anthony tricked the denizens of hell into giving him fire to warm his followers. Toward the end of the first act we meet Hans Unsine, a car mechanic who tells a familiar story of three sons who acquire three magical gifts to aid an ailing princess. Hans’s story lifts the spirits of the princess of Tedium, and the two fall madly into each other’s arms–just as the king storms in. He banishes Hans to the moon where, in act two, Hans must use the magical powers of folktale characters in order to return to earth and his princess.
