ITALIAN AMERICAN RECONCILIATION
Of course not. And so the playwright has to look elsewhere for somebody to write about. If you’re Shakespeare, you can write about ranting royalty or Arcadian swains piping on oat straws, or whatever. If you’re David Mamet, you’ve got fucking lowlifes, fucking thieves, and fucking hustlers. And if you’re John Patrick Shanley, there’s Little Italy.
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Shanley can be good on Little Italy. His Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck, for instance, packed in plenty of intensity and color–and great language–without falling any further into contempt for its characters than most movies do. The world he evoked may not have been real, but it mostly made sense on its own terms, and there was a lot of pleasure to be had in learning its rules as the film went on.
Aldo’s the real challenge. He’s a wild, brilliant talker and dumb as a post about people. And the script leaves the actor to make sense of the character pretty much on his own. Lenny Grossman’s not a bad Aldo: he gets the jokes across, he feeds the rest of the cast well, and he keeps things lively. But at least the night I saw him, he seemed utterly rehearsed. He needs to sound like he’s improvising furiously, making up anything to say to keep his fears at bay.
Do Huey and Janice get back together? Well, they at least have their moment, and it’s a fine one. When they embrace, the scene works in a way that it couldn’t on-screen. You hear the sound of their footsteps, the hushed clasp of one body pulled hard against another. It’s immensely moving. It makes you remember that there’s more to a good play than language. We’re all middle-class around here, so we can talk; Shanley should learn to shut up once in a while.
