“Italian American Reconciliation,” at the Manhattan Theater Club, is John Patrick Shanley’s latest offbeat comedy about the difficulty of finding love and married bliss in an imperfect world. Set in Little Italy, and directed by the author himself, it completes Mr. Shanley’s semi-autobiographical tetralogy about love and loneliness and the war between men and women and features a masterly performance by John Turturro. Mr. Turturro, who played the title role in “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” the play that began the cycle, is that rare being—an actor in the Al Pacino/John Malkovich school of mannered realism who manages to put his special stamp on a role without upstaging the material. Here he is irresistible as Aldo Scalicki, a young man trying to do good by seducing his best friend’s fierce ex-wife. The ex-wife is played by Jayne Haynes, who performed a number of roles exquisitely this summer in Jim Cartwrigtht’s “Road.” Miss Haynes and Mr. Shanley, incidentally were recently married, so the play is also a chance to see Mr. Shanley direct his current wife in a role that he has indicated is based on his former wife.
Today Shanley is best known as the author of “Moonstruck,” but before he was a hot young screenwriter he was a hip young playwright: our premier poet of singles anxiety. His plays mixed raw, searing emotions with sitcom tendencies. Rough-hewn, they tended to put college-bred ideas into the mouths of blue-collar street toughs and to be full of lost, solitary young people. They juxtaposed psychological acuity with incredibly young-seeming moments of self-conscious whimsicality. They had a pretentious streak a mile wide, but they were very, very funny. Shanley has the gift of gab. He writes wonderful Runyonesque dialogues—a sort of gritty, downtown version of sparkling drawing-room comedy—and highly rhetorical speeches that are fun to hear, because actors love to perform them.
The current play, which takes the form of a flashback—a story, Aldo tells us, with which he means to “teach” us something—concerns Aldo’s best friend, Huey (John Pankow), and the time Aldo tried to prevent him from going back to his ferocious ex-wife, Janice. Aldo feels, on the whole, that Teresa (Laura San Giacomo), the perfectly nice waitress Huey has been seeing, is better for him than Janice (Miss Haynes), who shot Huey’s dog. He nevertheless agrees to act as an emissary and pave the way for a midnight reconciliation between Huey and Janice—planning, all the while, to save Huey by hitting on Janice himself.
Like all Shanley’s urban fairy tales, “Italian American Reconciliation” has charm and a certain theatrical elegance. In the past, though, his whimsical premises have been vehicles for the dramatic exploration fo an idea. “Italian American Reconciliation” doesn’t really tell us anything. Like ‘Moonstruck,” it’s just a pretty story. With actors of Miss Haynes’ and Mr. Turturro’s ability, Shanley might have set up a great confrontation. But nothing much is revealed in the climactic scene between Aldo and Janice. It isn’t enough for us to discover that Janice’s abuse of Huey was an attempt to make him really “look at” her, that a desire for someone to “take charge” of her “like a man” lurks behind her fierceness, that her hatred of men stems from an unsatisfying relationship with her late father. These are Hollywood clichés. Nothing in the script gives Miss Haynes a chance to suggest why we should be interested in Janice or why she is worthy of redemption. It’s not Miss Haynes’ fault that Janice remains a monster, any more than it’s Miss San Giacomo’s fault that she gives a routine performance in the largely stock role of Teresa. In fact, although Helen Hanft fires off some good lines as Teresa’s Aunt May, no one in Shanley’s cast except Mr. Turturro has much of anything to do.
One of the best things about the production at the MTC is Santo Loquasto’s scenic design for the play. Dominated by a rotunda that sits slightly upstage left on a turntable–only one face visible at a time—it perfectly evokes the world of charming squalor that Shanley’s plays inhabit. It also forges visual links between the three localities its depicts—Huey’s apartment, Teresa’s diner, and the back-garden balcony of Janice’s apartment: there are corresponding instances of missing brickwork and peeled wallpaper, glimpses of wrought iron that foreshadow and echo one another, draped hangings that function similarly in different scenes.
In designing “Italian American Reconciliation,” Mr. Loquasto managed to unify a series of places that seem to exist both everywhere and nowhere—like the people in Shanley’s plays, whose lives and speech are made up of such familiar elements, but who live and speak in a way that no one has ever really known. Shanley also had three things to unify: the relationship between Aldo and Janice, the relationship between Janice and Huey, and the relationship between Aldo and the audience. But the moral that concludes the evening—“The greatest, the only, success is to be able to love”—seems to come out of nowhere; and there’s no connection between Huey’s midnight avowal to Janice—“If I have to go back to the beginning, right or wrong, and win you again … I am willing”—and his subsequent announcement the next day that, with Janice’s ghost laid to rest, he’s now ready to go off in pursuit of Teresa, whom he really loves. The real moral would appear to be that women are interchangeable. Perhaps Janice was right to be fierce.
If Shanley’s play is disappointing, that’s partly because it’s so vague on the subject of women. Not that plays have to be “about” women, but women have always been Shanley’s strong suit. He is genuinely interested in them, in the same way that he’s captivated by Little Italy, and possibly for the same reason: he seems to find us shabby but charming. It may be that he has run out of ideas about us. If so, I hope this is only a temporary condition and the result of married bliss.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, November 14, 1988