Comedy, tragedy and Italy all in one package
New Stratford show Napoli Milionaria! has comedy, tragedy and a lot of Italy
When reading Antoni Cimolino’s name in this and other newspapers, it’s usually in the context of his position as artistic director of the Stratford Festival: making season announcements; working alongside executive director Anita Gaffney on major capital projects such as the current renovation of the Tom Patterson Theatre Centre; navigating unexpected dramas such as the bomb scare that derailed this year’s opening night performance of “The Tempest.”
But Cimolino’s also an artist: an actor-turned-director who is helming two shows in this year’s Stratford season — “The Tempest,” now up and running after that unfortunate opening-night cancellation; and “Napoli Milionaria!,” a comedy with serious purpose by Eduardo De Filippo, to which Cimolino is bringing some personal investments as a first-generation Italian-Canadian.
A Neapolitan actor, playwright and screenwriter, De Filippo (1900-1984) is a beloved figure in Italy, but is not well-known in the English-speaking world. Cimolino first became aware of De Filippo’s work when a production of his play “La Grande Magia,” directed by Giorgio Strehler, toured to Toronto, and he chose a De Filippo play for his Stratford solo directing debut in 1997: “Filumena,” starring Lally Cadeau and the company’s then-artistic director Richard Monette.
Explaining the appeal of these three plays, all written in the 1940s, Cimolino likens De Filippo’s writing to Chekhov, “in that it is both comic and tragic, and the very things that are comic are inherently tragic, and vice versa.” But De Filippo’s work was not always this nuanced, Cimolino further explains: his early plays, written in the 1920s and ’30s, were light comedies. Enduring the Second World War in Naples forever changed De Filippo’s life and outlook. “Napoli Milionaria!” is all about that pivotal time.
“He looked out the window,” says Cimolino, “It was the beginning of the Allied campaign … and they really kind of threw everything at Naples. There was starvation in the city, there were so many kids on the street, so many people dead.”
“Napoli Milionaria!” takes place in the home of the Iovine family in the city’s working-class Spanish quarter. As the play opens in 1942, the matriarch Amalia (Brigit Wilson) is running a robust black-market business selling food to the neighbours, which her husband Gennaro (Tom McCamus) doesn’t approve of, but also doesn’t stop. War transforms the city and the family over the course of the play’s three acts.
“The play has a deeply moral purpose,” says Cimolino, “and it centres around food and community. Like, it’s all about taking the very essence of what we need to survive and using it to make a buck, so that your kids become servants, your neighbours become clients, and society becomes all about money.”
He’s been working on the project for some 18 months, first commissioning a literal translation of the script from Queens University professor Donato Santeramo, then working with playwright John Murrell on five drafts of an adaptation. Born in Canada to Italian parents, Cimolino’s first language was Italian, but he struggles to understand De Filippo’s play in the original because it’s written in a dense Neapolitan dialect.
While the production depicts a culture suffering from poverty and famine — in the early 1940s Neapolitans ate fish out of the local aquarium to stay alive — it does so through sometimes farcical means, as when Gennaro pretends to be dead on his bed so that the police don’t discover the coffee hidden under the mattress.
The original promotional photography for the production attempted to capture this tone and theme by picturing McCamus with food stuffed into his trousers, but some people contacted Stratford saying they found the
images problematic because, as Cimolino explains, they “felt that this somehow made light of the Italian immigrant situation.”
As the child of such immigrants himself, “the last thing I would want is to cause offence in that way,” so they toned down the imagery.
The role of Gennaro is a complex one: a First World War veteran, he initially comes off as passive and emasculated, but goes on a literal and figurative journey during the play that reveals different aspects of his character.
In McCamus, Cimolino says he’s found the actor who can pull of this unusual combination — “a leading man” who can also “play very low status.”
“Tom’s heart, his simplicity, his goodness, sets a tone in a company like this,” says Cimolino.
“You can decide what your company’s going to be like. Is it going to be about who gets the parking spot and who’s getting the feature, front page (story)?... Or you can make it about a sense of mission as an artist, and a desire to try to take on a part that isn’t glitzy, but reveals part of you, or part of the truth.”
Research for the production included a trip last December to Italy, which was clearly not a hardship.
“I love Naples, I can’t tell you how much I love it,” says Cimolino dreamily.
And then our interview ended so that he could make an important phone call, and the role of artist segued into that of artistic director once again.