Document text
> August 04. 2002 2:00AM OSF's 'Saturday, Sunday, Monday' is scrumptious Like dreams and letters, eating scenes are tough to pull off. In Eduardo De Filippo's Saturday, Sunday, Monday they are the play. The people here are either preparing food, getting ready to eat, eating or digesting. It works. It hits you like a good spaghetti dinner: complex, full of life and worth lingering over. The comedy about the Priore family of Naples opened Saturday in the OSF's Angus Bowmer Theatre, directed by Libby Appel. They say you should save the best until last, and this feel-good play was the final OSF debut this year, in a new translation by San Francisco-based dramaturg Beatrice Basso and the OSF's Linda Alper, who also stars. I don't know about other translations, but this one nails it, yielding shades of meaning and nuance and comic timing to eat up. Mama Rosa's (Alper) Sunday meals are rituals that take over weekends. But Don Peppino Priore (Tony DeBruno) stews as Rosa prepares the crucial rag? and children, friends, neighbors, and relatives come and go with their quirky gifts, stories, lives. Peppino is sure his wife is having an affair with his upstairs neighbor Don Luigi (Jeffrey King), an accountant. His suspicions are submerged in little quarrels and the battle of the sexes, all seasoned with the smells of actual Italian cooking done on the set. I am not the person to ask about the women in this house, Peppino says darkly. In addition to writing and directing, De Filippo was an actor known for his economy of word and gesture. He is said to have created the definitive Peppino. Although DeBruno is not always understated, there are maybe echoes of De Filippo; he has Eduardo moments using silence to react to others. Alper, too, has her Eduardo moments, including a fine one in which we see her spirit light up silently to Peppino's jealousy. As the too-thoughtful and overly demonstrative Luigi, King is oil to the flames until DeBruno throws his hat symbolically to the floor. What simmers early boils over, beginning with the calamari and winding up with Peppino cursing his wife, then his life. To give food is of course to give love, and Rosa is nurturing a tradition that connects generations. Being fed are some lesser characters rendered so skillfully that we never mind that they're here for our amusement. There's Peppino's sister Meme (Eileen DeSandre), a domineering woman who thinks she's independent. There's her sickly son Attilio (Dan Donohue, in an uncanny performance). There is the petulant Guilianella (Linda K. Morris), whose romance is a subplot. There's Raffaele (John Pribyl), Peppino's actor wannabe brother. Rosa's aging father, Antonio (Sandy McCallum), is a retired hat-maker and shopkeeper who obsessively blocks everybody's hat. I don't know why a hat that doesn't fit is the funniest thing this side of a good pratfall, but it is. Pribyl's character is a nod to the Commedia dell 'Arte, among whose rigidly defined characters was Pucinella, who was understood to be from Naples. Raffaele plays him in a street theater, and we see him in his mask with his baggy shirt over his belly (but without his usual outsized hump). When things are working, they really work. Scene designer William Bloodgood's Neapolitan dining room and kitchen seem dead-on, as do Deborah M. Dryden's costumes. But the play belongs finally to DeBruno and Alper, who have parts to kill for, and kill the audience instead. Part of the fun is that Rosa is almost as big an idiot as Peppino. The Priores' problem in the end is a misunderstanding, but we don't mind (hey, it's not King Lear). Timing throughout is exquisite. When the funniest line in the play is Alper's She does her best, something is right. When the next-funniest is DeSandre's I think you're going a little too far, and next is Donohue's Mama says there's nothing wrong with you, something is very right indeed. You have to be there. In De Filippo's Naples, little people often struggle against overwhelming odds. A little illusion might help. At bottom, in these struggling, little people looking for love and dignity, we see ourselves. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail http://www.mailtribune.com/article/20020804/News/308049987 © 2014 Copyright © 1995-2011 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement -->