About the Play:

Carmela's Table is a full-length drama by Vittorio Rossi. At first glance a classic tale of immigrants to North America, there is something more than the conflict of a romanticized past confronting the excitement of a brighter future. Carmela's Table, Part 2 of A Carpenter's Trilogy, finds Silvio Rosato, the carpenter and decorated Italian war hero, settled in a new suburb of Montréal with his wife, their three children and his mother, applying for immigrant status in 1957.

Carmela's Table is Part 2 of the autobiographical A Carpenter's Trilogy; three powerful plays, inspired by true events, about an Italian family finding new life in Montréal over the course of 40 years. It takes place in a rented Ville-Émard bungalow in the spring of 1957, some six months after the fateful events depicted in Hellfire Pass. Silvio Rosato, a carpenter and decorated World War II veteran, has been in North America for about a year, but his wife, Carmela, has just arrived from Italy with their children and his mother. The kitchen table Silvio built for Carmela serves as the family meeting place and an eye of the storm in an escalating feud between Silvio and Filomena, his now-legendary mother. Bristling with a cold and violent sense of outrage at the wartime horrors he survived in North Africa; his prison camp experiences in England; a bigamist father who abandoned his young family to emigrate to Chicago; betrayed by his mother who raised him and his sister in the humiliating poverty of their Italian village; it is easy for the audience to empathize with Silvio's cold-hearted need for retribution, lashing out at everyone and everything around him as the play opens. While Vittorio Rossi's dramatic portraits of Silvio's manipulative mother, Filomena, his inexplicably loyal wife, Carmela, and their understanding and supportive neighbours, Neva and Dave, are finely drawn variations on what have become pop-culture stereotypes of Italian immigrants, they clearly exist to allow Rossi to peel back the complex layers of Silvio's psyche – to reveal what drives him to his bi-polar excesses of emotion: the wilfully constructed memory, the unassailable sense of honour, the judgmental dismissal of what he perceives are the faults of others, and an intransigent refusal to acknowledge his complicity in the creation of his own problems – all the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In the final cathartic scenes of Carmela's Table, however, Silvio is forced to understand that to have consistently chosen not to act on what he has always known has also been a choice – one that now finally threatens to overwhelm and destroy his family.

Carmela's Table premiered in 2006 at the venerable Centaur Theatre, the oldest English-language theatre in Montréal, and won the Montréal English Critic Circle Award (MECCA) for Best New Text.

Cast: 3 female, 2 male

What people say:

"Taken together, Rossi's [A Carpenter's Trilogy] plays represent the heftiest addition to the Canadian dramatic canon since David French's Mercer Cycle or George F. Walker's East End Plays." — Montréal Gazette

"…arguably the best play I've seen in a very, very long time." — The Montréaler

"There is dramatic power here… second time out, the volatile Rosato family still offers passion through familial drama." — Variety

About the Playwright:

Vittorio Rossi is a playwright, actor, director, and screenwriter who grew up in the Ville-Émard neighbourhood of Montréal and still lives there. He has established himself as a significant Italian-Canadian voice on the English-Canadian stage. His plays have been produced in Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, New York City, Boston, Syracuse and The Stratford Festival in Ontario.