THE TRUTH IS RARELY PURE,
AND NEVER SAFE, IN TASTY LITTLE RABBIT

There is a tender brutality in the way Robert Mammana shatters a glass plate negative under his heel in Moving Arts’ aching new production of Tom Jacobson’s Tasty Little Rabbit. It happens early. The crack is too small to be mythic, too large to ignore. A face, a moment, a fragile idea of beauty vanishes in an instant. The room seems unsure whether to exhale or keep holding its breath. That moment signals with eerie clarity that what follows isn’t just theater. It is something raw, necessary, and uneasy. Tasty Little Rabbit is a haunting, erotically charged excavation of beauty, memory, and the violence of being seen.

The narrative folds across two Sicilian winters. In 1936, Cesare Acrosso—Taormina’s podestà (non-elected fascist mayor)—is determined to purge his town of degeneracy. His colleague, Francesco Maffiotti, arrives from Rome with ambiguous instructions—and a gaze that sees too much. Together they investigate Pancrazio Buciuni, an aging Sicilian photographer whose archive of glass negatives depicts young men posed in classical tableaux. As Pancrazio is drawn into interrogation, the play pulls back to 1897, when he himself was one of those boys, modeling for the real-life Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, a German expatriate whose photographs of local youths made him both famous and notorious.

Rob Nagle, Massi Pregoni

By 1936, the Italy of poetry and philosophy had been smothered by the Italy of parades and uniforms. Fascism demanded obedience not only in action but in memory. Though homosexuality was not technically outlawed in the legal code, it was surveilled and punished as an enemy of the state. Sicily’s reputation for sensual permissiveness made it an embarrassment to the national project of virile modernity. In 1897, Taormina had been something else entirely. A haven. A sun-drenched pageant of permissibility for artists, aristocrats, and exiles. For European gay men, it offered what their own countries refused: air, light, and the illusion of safety.

In 1897 an English visitor arrives named Sebastian Melmoth, a man cloaked in charm and disgrace, who seeks aesthetic refuge. The recognition he provokes lingers just outside language. He is not the man he claims to be, and everyone senses it without knowing how. His sentences come wrapped in epigrams and ellipses. “The skin is not a mask,” he remarks to Pancrazio, “though it can be worn as one.” His delight in art is real, but it carries the weight of failure. He offers praise, but always too late. His words are measured, yet behind them trails a long, private exhaustion. Later, he muses aloud, “Desire without danger is merely taste.” He moves through the world like a man already under indictment. Nothing he says is innocent. Nothing he wants is uncomplicated. His presence is both ghostly and theatrical, a character haunted by the limits of beauty and the cost of having once believed in it.

Massi Pregoni, Rob Nagle, Robert Mammana

The actor playing Cesare becomes von Gloeden. Francesco becomes Sebastian Melmoth. Pancrazio is portrayed both in youth and in old age. The actors speak to each other across decades, but nothing ever feels distant. Time doesn’t pass here. It haunts.

This is not a traditional plot. It is a haunted archive, held together by ideological tension and emotional residue. The play refuses a single moral center. Instead, it offers a grid of intersecting motives and histories. Characters argue not only over what happened, but how it should be seen, who has the right to speak, and whether memory is ever truly theirs to control.

Tasty Little Rabbit continues Jacobson’s fascination with moral entanglement, aesthetic philosophy, and the queering of historical memory. Like earlier works that dramatize the collision between public ideology and private longing, this script leans into discomfort with precision and care. It explores not what art means, but what it is used to justify, suppress, or resurrect. The play feels like a dark twin to Jacobson’s earlier Bunbury, which gleefully imagines identity as escape. Here, identity is a trap, glittering and tightening. The more the characters remember, the less they can leave behind.

Rob Nagle, Robert Mammana, Massi Pregoni

The script does not permit ethical comfort. It constantly redirects the audience’s sympathies. When Cesare destroys a negative and Pancrazio sobs, revealing “This is my face. Was my face,” the audience must weigh ideology against human cost. Every scene pits power against vulnerability, but then turns the mirror, suggesting that complicity lives in both. “There must be a place in art for love,” Pancrazio pleads, but his love has already been classified, judged, and reframed as degeneracy.

George Bamber directs with precision and assurance. His treatment of the temporal shifts and character transformations is smooth and clear. Mark Mendelson’s set, composed of textured stone and fractured surfaces, evokes an Italy shaped by ruin. Dan Weingarten’s lighting carries much of the narrative burden. It moves between Fascist fluorescence and nostalgic warmth with a controlled fluidity. Shifts in light signal shifts in time, allegiance, and meaning.

Robert Mammana, Massi Pregoni, Rob Nagle

One production choice threatens the magic of the production. Nicholas Santos’s projections—images of Sicilian landscapes, churches, and coastlines—risk making the play feel like a romantic postcard. Yet Sicily, in this text, is not a backdrop. It is the battleground. A place where art, power, and desire collide. The play is not about the postcard. It is about what the postcard conceals. A darker image. A broken photograph. A body being looked at without consent.

The performances are riveting. Robert Mammana plays Cesare with severe control and then opens into von Gloeden with a disquieting softness. Rob Nagle’s Maffiotti is a bureaucratic chess player, while his Sebastian trembles with fading elegance. Massi Pregoni, portraying Pancrazio both as a youth and in old age, serves as the emotional axis of the production. His features possess the beauty and physique of a Michelangelo statue, perfectly suited to the role of the beautiful young model. He is radiant in his younger form and deeply haunted in his older one.

Rob Nagle, Massi Pregoni, Robert Mammana

Tom Jacobson’s writing vibrates with a dense weave of historical and philosophical allusion, echoing the architecture and seriousness of Tom Stoppard. Both writers favor intellectual compression and uneasy mirroring. Yet Jacobson diverges from Stoppard in one essential way. The cleverness here does not delight. It wounds. Beneath the argumentation lies something raw, something human and humiliated. This is not a game of ideas. This is survival, barely masked by theory.

Religious and martyr imagery saturates the work. The invocation of Saint Sebastian is not metaphorical. It is enacted. Pancrazio’s poses and the staging of symbolic violence echo paintings and devotional tableaux. The bodies in this play are always being watched, judged, framed. “It embodies no artistic ideals,” Cesare insists as he crushes the negative. “Not strength, nor beauty, neither aesthetic glory nor philosophical rigor.” Pancrazio’s reply comes through tears: “But love.”

Rob Nagle, Robert Mammana, Massi Pregoni

The title is not symbolic. Pancrazio accuses von Gloeden of offering him up “like a tasty little rabbit.” The line is quoted directly. It is not a metaphor. It is a moment of plain speech within a play crowded with artifice. And that is its sting. You are not watching a parable. You are watching a testimony.

There is no blood spilled. But there is rupture everywhere. In glass. In silence. In the act of being seen. The audience is given fragments: a confession, a kiss, a sob, a sliver of a negative. Some shimmer. Others wound.

Barring the intrusion of projections, this is a stark, finely tuned production of a play that refuses comfort. The play doesn’t explain. It accumulates. It asks the audience not to watch passively, but to stay inside its slow, deliberate unfolding. This isn’t about defining beauty. It’s about what beauty has excused, obscured, and broken—and what it may yet demand.

Rob Nagle, Massi Pregoni, Robert Mammana

Tasty Little Rabbit deserves a broader stage—one large enough to hold its unease. Whether a theatre in New York or London has the courage to host a work this challenging remains to be seen. But Jacobson’s vision doesn’t just invite attention. It insists on it.

When the lights fall, what’s changed isn’t the narrative or even the people onstage. It’s how you see what’s just unfolded—and maybe how you see the act of seeing itself. The question lingers, quieter than applause: not whether beauty redeems, but whether we’ve ever reckoned with what it destroys.

photos by Philip Pirolo

Early Birds
Moving Arts
Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave.
Fri & Sat at 8; Sun at 4; Thurs at 8 (June 5)
ends on June 6, 2025
for tickets, call 323.472.5646 or visit Tasty Rabbit or Moving Arts

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA