Pirandello’s Mad Wife: Why Erasure Still Matters – Michaela Di Cesare, writer and performer

Michaela Di Cesare, writer and performer: “The Mad
Wife: Why Erasure Still Matters”
“How does a woman become a footnote? 1
Her name was Maria Antonietta Portulano. I will find her.”
One question. One footnote. One name. One promise. In
December 2013, that was all playwright and performer
Michaela Di Cesare had to go on as she began a year as
Playwright-in-Residence at Imago Theatre, under the
mentorship of Micheline Chevrier. Over the course of that
year, Michaela peeled away the layers that kept this
mysterious woman under wraps, confronting time and again
the fact that Pirandello is beloved and regarded as having
brought Italian theatre out of the dark ages. Michaela’s
research culminated in a trip to Sicily and a (literal)
watershed moment at the site of the Nobel Prize-winning
playwright’s tombstone.
1 “The great burden Luigi Pirandello carried was his wife, who
went insane. She persecuted him with an unprovoked and crazy
jealousy.”
Michaela completed her MA at the University of Toronto’s
Drama Centre and is a recipient of award for Best Text
(with a Best Actress and Revelation nomination) and the
Launchpad Award for Emerging Artists. At Black Theatre
Workshop she appeared in staged readings of Andrea
Scott’s Eating Pomegranates Naked and Leah-Simone
Bowen’s The Hallway. Michaela has performed her onewoman
show 8 Ways my Mother was Conceived in Toronto,
Montreal, New York City, Ottawa, Hudson, Winnipeg and
Stratford. Notable roles include Rosa in The Rose Tattoo,
Saura in Titus Andronicus, Jaya Patel in The Arrangement,
Mariedl in Holy Mothers and the Young Woman in My
Child. TV credits include Psych Out, Fatal Vows, A
Stranger in My Home and Sex & Ethnicity. Michaela
recently one year as the Playwright-in-Residence at Imago
Theatre where she wrote In Search of Antonietta, a play
about Luigi Pirandello’s wife. The year before, she
completed the Artist Mentorship Program at Black Theatre
Workshop in Playwriting and Acting.