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The Angelina Project
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER The world premiere in Anaheim Hills depicts hardships of Italian immigrant women. There's a lot that's absorbing and moving about "The Angelina Project," Frank Canino's partly fictionalized dramatization of the case of Angelina Napolitano, an Italian immigrant convicted of the murder of her husband in Ontario, Canada, on Easter Sunday, 1911. The pregnant Angelina was abused by her brutish husband and, fearing for her life, took an ax to his skull as he slept in their bedroom. Canino used the facts of the case as the basis for an intriguing mystery that's also part treatise on social issues. What would happen, he asks, if a present-day Italian-American academic began digging into the case's court records and, in doing so, uncovered a pattern of, in her words, "secrets and lies" - one that hit perilously close to home? Since The Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills first agreed to produce "Angelina," the show has received several workshop stagings, and was a finalist last year in Trustus Theatre's South Carolina Playwrights Festival. The Chance's staging, however, is still the work's world premiere - one that reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of this intriguing piece of theater. The academic who's the focus of the play is Amelia Covello (Annie Mezzacappa), a high-strung 40-something awash in a thesis project on "How the Law Treats Women." Amelia becomes fascinated - and soon, obsessed - with the Napolitano Case (redubbed "the Angelina Project" by playwright Canino). Even after women got the vote, Amelia's research finds, they were treated as second-class citizens in the eyes of the law - even in relatively progressive North America. What kind of brutality from her husband, Pietro, could drive Angelina to kill him? Pietro, we soon learn, wanted his pregnant wife to sell her body to provide for the household. "The Angelina Project" shows the results of the trial and the irreversible damage it caused the Napolitano family: Once convicted, Angelina began to appeal, but as the process dragged on, her family was split up and each of her four children put up for adoption. As Canino's drama illustrates, Amelia's preoccupation with Angelina's sorrowful plight has a corrosive effect on her own screwed-up life. Her relationship with her mother, Rafaella (Lorie Verwiel-Mumper), testy at best, goes down the tubes. Her chilly marriage to Italian-American car salesman Vinnie hits the breaking point. Even her interaction with her daughter, Toni (Lisa Morton), a bright, intuitive girl whom she treats as an equal, becomes dangerously strained. In trying to make this first full staging of "The Angelina Project" soar, director Daryl Hovis is battling two opponents. One is fairly permissible: several instances of unconvincing acting. The other is far more serious: a text that is by turns compelling and maddeningly frustrating... Will Pellegrini's scenic design is ingeniously practical, with Amelia's cluttered apartment upstage left, with Rafaella's kitchen slightly downstage against the opposite wall. The rear wall functions as numerous settings - the Napolitano home, courtroom, prison - and is equipped with four small video monitors used to illustrate scenic details, objects, and even quotes from the script. The problem is that, even within the Chance's small confines, the screen images are often far too small -- which is not a knock on Jamaal Parhams' frequently creative video images. Robert G. Davis' lighting scheme and Omar Inguanzo's sound design also go a long way in enhancing the dynamics of the text, and the show's costumes (uncredited) are simple and believable, with nary a slip-up in reflecting the shifting time periods. Regardless of its tendency for overstatement, "The Angelina Project" is powerful material that requires powerful acting. At The Chance, it gets it from several actors. At the core is Sigalit Sollitto, who embodies the qualities that make Angelina self-sacrificing in a saintly yet credible way. Sollitto is warm and loving, depicting a gentle, decent person pushed to the edge by unceasing abuse. Her spoken Italian is fluid and smooth, her broken English slow and deliberate. The play offers many moments of poetry, and Sollitto is at the center of most of them, as in the final seconds, when Angelina softly says, "Reason calls a truce at last." Playing all three creepy husbands, Jay Brown shifts easily from one to another. His Neapolitan Pietro is the classic villain - coarse, grimy, brutish. As Amelia's stepdad, he's got an Irish-Celtic brogue, and is equally crude, while as Amelia's husband Vinnie, he's hotheaded and short-tempered. Mezzacappa is believably overwrought as the frenzied
Amelia. The problem is that she's so over the top right from the get-go
that her performance has nowhere to go. As Rafaella, Verwiel-Mumper better
modulates her performance, but she doesn't create the same impression
of Italian heritage as the cast's other women. She effectively communicates
the crushing guilt that weighs Rafaella down, but she essays much of this
role either squinting or with eyes shut - and it's hard to buy an actor
who doesn't look her fellows in the eye. The rest of Hovis' cast gives
honest performances. As the blunt Toni, Morton is rock-solid and reliable.
Portraying both Amelia and Rafaella as children, the adolescent Christina
Long is frequently heartbreaking... Kim Kiedrowski delivers yeoman work
as various figures, including an Irish-Catholic priest, a politician and
a prosecuting attorney.
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LOS ANGELES TIMES Drama: Angelina Project' playwright was intrigued by the true story of an abused wife who killed her husband. Lizzie Borden meets "The Burning Bed" in "The Angelina Project," a play based on the true story of an abused wife who sees no way out of her predicament than to take an ax to the skull of her sleeping husband. The killing, which occurred 90 years ago in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is being reenacted these days on the stage of the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills. The gaps in the story of Angelina and Pietro Napolitano, rather than the forensic details of their case, intrigued author Frank Canino enough to write the play and embark on a five-year campaign to get it produced. Canino, 62, grew up in Chicago but spent most of his professional life in Canada directing plays and teaching theater at universities in Nova Scotia and Ontario. He belatedly branched into playwriting, a long-submerged interest he had shied away from in his youth because "the idea of being alone in a room [with nothing but blank pages to fill] was terrifying." In 1996, a Toronto producer who liked his work asked him to read a scholarly article on the Napolitano case and see if he could turn it into a play. Angelina, a poor Italian immigrant, was 28, the mother of four children and pregnant. Her jealous, abusive husband was threatening to kill her if she didn't prostitute herself to bring in cash. She killed him, turned herself in and served 12 years in prison. By then, her children were gone, adopted with no trail to follow. A gap in the story fired Canino's imagination: about two hours elapsed between the killing and Angelina's asking a neighbor to summon the police. He envisioned Angelina spending a final peaceful, loving hour with her children. Canino says the play quotes verbatim what she told the police: "Here I am. Take me. I am ready to die." The play imagines Pietro as a man brutalized by anti-immigrant prejudice who takes out his anger on Angelina and the children. It hinges not only on the murder story, but on the quest, decades later, of a troubled, middle-aged woman named Amelia Covello to research the case for her graduate school thesis. Along the way, she discovers that she is the granddaughter of Angelina and Pietro. The truth, pried from her mother after a lifetime of secrecy, promises to set Amelia free from her miserable, emotionally barren marriage. Before writing the play, Canino studied domestic abuse issues. He watched "The Burning Bed," the 1984 television movie, also based on a true story, that starred Farrah Fawcett as a Michigan mother of three who torched the sleeping husband who had beaten her for years. "I was fascinated by what happens when there is something in a family that is kept secret. The abuse doesn't get resolved in one generation. It is a heritage" that gets passed on, Canino said. "It was very disturbing to read some of the material and, from the little I knew about my own family, to make some of those connections." He thinks audiences and casts have been making those connections, too. "Every time there has been at least one person who came up to me privately and said, 'You know what I found out about my family? You won't believe it.' And then you'd [hear about] a skeleton out of the closet." To underscore how the past is always present, and how domestic violence is a perennial blot on the human condition, Canino has his play jump suddenly and repeatedly between Angelina's drama deep in the past and her descendant's contemporary search for the truth. The playwright also adds a fantastical mythic overlay: at times, Angelina turns into Clytemnestra, the ancient Greek queen who vengefully kills her husband in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon." "The tough issue was whether I could keep the story clear," said director Darryl B. Hovis. "From the comments [after the first three performances last weekend], the audience was confused in the first act but all the pieces were put together in the second act, which is how Frank wanted it." ...[Frank Canino's] journey with "The Angelina Project" has taken him from Toronto, where the script was published last year by Guernica Editions, to Connecticut, where the play recently had a student production at the University of Hartford, to Sarasota, Fla., where a small professional company, the 173-seat Florida Studio Theater, gave it a staged reading last month... Canino says he moved to New York after more than 25 years
in Canada partly because it is a better vantage point for pursuing a playwriting
career. The thought of writing in solitude no longer holds any terror.
"Now," he says, "I love it and need it."
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AOL DIGITAL CITY The main theme of The Angelina Project can be summed
up from by a key line offered by the main character: "There's no such
thing as the past being over. It keeps happening again and again -- right
here and now." The play concerns a forty-something Italian-American woman
who finds both her career and marriage threatened as she digs deeper into
her academic thesis concerning the scars born by her female ancestors.
Author Frank Canino's play was a finalist in the Trustus Theatre's South
Carolina Playwrights' Festival and was recently published, but these shows
mark its world premiere performances. Daryl B. Hovis, an actor as well
as the artistic director and theatre chair of the Culver City Academy
of Visual and Performing Arts, directs.
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KTST FM RADIO A brilliant combination of historical fact and liberal generalization, "The Angelina Project" follows the stressful, thankless work of Amelia Covello as she juggles with a family that's falling apart and a career that could be in jeopardy as she attempts to finish her historical thesis on her family's past. Amelia's daughter, Toni is exasperated that her mom is overworking herself and wants to move out. The deeper she probes, the more skeletons seem to leap out of Amelia's closet. The play opens in today's reality, but as it works its way through, we are taken, via a series of brutally frank flashbacks, into the bitter past of three generations of Amelia's family. Angelina's husband was an abusive alcoholic, driven by the legendary hot temper of Italian men, always in need of money, and even willing to force Angelina into prostitution in order to get the cash he seeks. We come to find out that Rafaella's husband was no better, often asking their daughter if she wants him to kill her mother. Amelia's own husband is not as dark a character, but he is unsupportive of her work and career. All three husbands are played with gusto by Jay Brown. The flashbacks also take us into the courtroom where Angelina is cross-examined by the two attorneys (Kim Kiedrowski, who also portrays a priest in another scene, and the multi-faceted Jay Brown again)during a grueling trial that resulted when she could no longer stand the abuse and decided to murder her husband. Darryl B. Hovis' tight direction allows us to effortlessly let our imagination wander as members of the cast take on multiple roles to tell the story of Angelina's deed on Easter Sunday, 1911, in Sault St. Marie, Ontario, Canada. Renee Hambleton adroitly doubles as Amelia's friend, and during another scene, an American reporter. There are some unexpected twists in the story that kept me guessing until the end, and I'm not going to tell you about them here, because they are an integral part of the story, not just an afterthought. Suffice it to say that when Angelina takes the axe to her husband, you just about feel like standing up and applauding as you shout "Whack him again!". It's a murder most foul, but one that the audience finds no fault with---if ever a man needed killing, it was Angelina's husband. My recommendation is to go to The Chance Theater to see
"The Angelina Project". It's a frank, mature piece of theatrical work
that will strike a chord in your heart and stir the soul with a clever
script and acting that is downright luminary.
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NORTHERN LIGHTS Frank Canino's "The Angelina Project" opens with a frustrated Amelia juggling the demands of family life, including dealing with her estranged husband with whom she continues to live, her own budding relationship with a "boyfriend," her rebellious young adult daughter and the muriadds of other conflicting commitments typical of contemporary women's lives, including her thesis. She has become immersed in Italian-American women's weak legal status before the fifties, as seen in the tragic case of Angelian Napolitano, an ax murderess who disposed of her husband when seven months pregnant with her fifth child. The case made worldwide headlines, with sympathy from liberal camps elevating Angelina to a symbol of a male dominated justice system which also racially discriminated against the Irish and Italian immigrant minorities alike. As the mystery unravels, we observe five generations of Italian women on two continents deal with abusive husbands whose main quality is they are adequate providers. The traditional cultural environment taught the women to ifnore the drunkenness and erring outside the marital bed and put up with their spoises' accusations of wantonness and inability to cope with their wives' superior intellectual acumen, all of which lead to physical abuse. Since part of this intriguing drama;s appeal is its interesting twists, it is difficult to analyze the plot without giving too much away. Suffice to say that touched one are themes such as incest and genetically inherited mental characteristics like violence and insanity. Eight actors share a variety of roles across this complicated landscape, with only Angelina, Amelia and her daughter Toni remaining in the same character during the entire play. Jay Brown is excellent as all three husbands, modulating his performance from Angelina's brutish, inanely jealous husband, to Rafaella's drunk and Amelia's benign rogue. Sigalit Sollitto gives a wrenching performance in Italian and heavily accented English as desperate Angelina who is driven to murder because she feels she has no other possible choice, an ultimate act of sacrifice to protect her children. Her husband's obsessive, self-centered sexuality brings an otherwise highly intelligent, normal woman to the edge of insanity because she is trapped like paralyzed fly in a web. Amelia draws parallels to her own situation, and her daughter already perceives potential patterns to avoid. Even today, educated women who have raised families in lieu of a career often find limited options in mid-life for a return to the workforce and a life of their own outside the constraints of marriage. Underlying the theme of adversarial heterosexual relationships' high failure rates is a subtle hint at the gentler, more compatible homosexual unions. Our jails and prisons continue to be populated by the victims of cycles of ciolence and sexual abuse where former victims become perpatrators pf the same crimes. Yetm the message is that it is possible to make redemptive choices and that individuals do have control ober their destiny including the power to make the necessary changes to break destructive patterns. In finding the courage to confront the demons which haunt us, we are able to free ourselves from their inhibiting shackles. The simple set gives us three symbolically delineated times and palces with a stark and haunting cannonical magenta lighting design reminiscent of the mystical depths of a cathedral. Any depiction of Italian-American culture would not be complete without ample food and music, and both provide a unifying thread weaving through every scene. The script is a combination of historical facts and imaginative
conjecture, directed by Darryl Hovis, also an actor with the Chance. Originally
scheduled for production last year, it premiered at the innovative Chance
on June 15. Its appeal allows overlooking a cast with mixed acting abilities.
What it lacks in polish, it more than makes up in content and is a definitely
must-see of the season from our little gem of an Anaheim Hills-Yorba Linda
backyard theater.
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