Devour the Moon
It’s based on Marinetti’s 1932 publication The Futurist Cookbook, which extended his avant-garde movement from the page to the kitchen. Proposing fantastical edibles to replace the stultifying Italian staple pasta, he established the Holy Palate Restaurant, essentially a chic performance event that shocked and entertained patrons who came as much to gawk as to eat. Daniels and his team have done a good job of re-creating a Holy Palate banquet. The show is centered around a young girl who’s first seduced and then repulsed by Marinetti’s visionary fanaticism, a conventional narrative frame that goes against Marinetti’s antitraditionalist ideas of literature and turns this extravagantly imagined evening into something of a morality play. But the re-created futurist event itself is full of wonderful surprises.
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Marinetti’s dangerous insanity and narcissistic oppression become increasingly clear through this well-cultivated excess, but in the end it’s all a little too fun. Too bad the creators didn’t trust the persuasive power of excessive, entertaining futurist fragmentation when they wrote the script. By framing the piece with a traditional narrative, they softened the excitement and danger behind the clowning and let the audience off the hook.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo of Marc Silva playing Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in “Devour the Moon” by Suzanne Plunkett.
