LIANNE SCHOENWIESNER, Spotlights Photography
Michael Notardonato stars in The American Theater Group’s production of “My Italy Story.”
The DaGato family has been torn apart, for decades, by a simmering feud. Thomas DaGato, the 20-something storyteller in Joseph Gallo’s one-man play “My Italy Story,” doesn’t even know what it’s all about.
“Every time I would ask my mother about the argument,” Gallo’s semi-autobiographical character says, “she’d just give me answers like, ‘Oh, it’s an old fight. Why bring it up? It’s over. The whole thing has been so blown out of proportion that I don’t think anybody knows what happened anymore.’ ”
Spurred by his desire to bring the warring factions of the family together, and by a 3 a.m. visit by the ghost of his grandmother to his Hoboken apartment, Thomas takes it upon himself to get to the bottom of the mystery. He quits his office job to visit his family’s original hometown of Vallata, Italy, where, he hopes, some relatives are still living. The trip represents a leap of faith — how it will lead him to the answers he is looking for is unclear — but he takes it.
LIANNE SCHOENWIESNER, Spotlights Photography
Michael Notardonato “My Italy Story.”
The American Theater Group presented “My Italy Story” at The Hamilton Stage at The Union County Performing Arts Center in Rahway, Oct. 24-27, with Charlotte Cohn directing and Michael Notardonato as Thomas. Four more shows are planned for The Sieminski Theater in Basking Ridge, Nov. 1-3. I saw one of the Rahway shows.
“My Italy Story” is vividly written. When Thomas starts talking about the extended-family Sunday dinners of his youth, for instance, his mind goes to “an image of my grandmother in the kitchen, cooking. She dressed like a gipsy: She always dressed like a gipsy. And she had the softest voice. I can still hear her by the screen door, calling my name. … at the sound of my name I would freeze, as if playing Statue.”
Thomas also says, of his Uncle Rudy, “he’s a retired Teamster. He’s got faded tattoos on both arms, and now they just look like these huge black and blue marks. He’s something out of the movie ‘On the Waterfront.’ (And) he’s fat. When he sits down, his chair actually disappears.”
Notardonato has energy and personality to spare as Thomas; though this play is made up of 80 minutes of one person talking, nonstop, and not exactly sticking to a streamlined narrative — even his digressions have digressions — I never felt my attention wandering. It helps, of course, that Thomas, using different voices and mannerisms, becomes countless different characters — mostly members of the family, and mostly pretty eccentric — as he tells his story.
LIANNE SCHOENWIESNER, Spotlights Photography
Michael Notardonato in “My Italy Story.”
Props are minimal, but helpful: A piece of cloth, for instance, gets wrapped around Notardonato’s shoulders, to represent a shawl, and cradled in his arms, to represent a baby. Projections behind him add atmosphere. Sound effects are occasionally effective, too, evoking, for instance, the roar of the bus’ motor on the trip to Italy, and the undercurrent of murmuring voices at a family gathering.
The Italy trip is the most absorbing part of the play, as it represents a crazy plunge into the unknown. Vallata is a small town, and Thomas hops on a plane not really knowing where it is, or if anyone from his family is still there, or what they may be able to tell him about the rift. (The action is set in 1997, so Internet information was not as readily available to travelers as it is now.) It’s a big adventure, and quite an ordeal — Vallata, it turns out, is in a remote area, in the Apennine Mountains — and while Thomas doesn’t get all the answers to his questions while he is there, he does make the kind of connections he had been hoping to make.
And the trip does result, in a roundabout way, in him getting those answers — which end up being quite surprising — after he returns to where this all started, in New Jersey.
(Note: Gallo also writes about his Thomas DaGato character, later in his life, in his one-man play “Long Gone Daddy,” which I reviewed at Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken, in 2016. Click HERE to read that review.)
American Theater Group will present “My Italy Story” at The Sieminski Theater in Basking Ridge, Nov. 1 at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 2 at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m., and Nov. 3 at 2:30 p.m. Visit americantheatergroup.org or sieminskitheater.org.
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