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Hellfire Pass

Hellfire Pass
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
Author: Vittorio Rossi
Publisher: Talonbooks (cover image may change)
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 128
Pub. Date: 2007
ISBN-10: 0889225648
ISBN-13: 9780889225640
Cast Size: 2 female, 5 male

About the Play:

Hellfire Pass is a full-length drama by Vittorio Rossi. The time, Autumn, 1956. The city, Chicago. Hellfire Pass, Part 1 of A Carpenter's Trilogy, follows Silvio Rosato, a carpenter and decorated World War II veteran who has journeyed from his native Italy to Chicago via Montréal in order to meet the family he never knew. He brings with him a simple request. What he gets in return is much more than he bargained for.

Hellfire Pass is Part 1 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 is 1956, and Silvio Rosato, a carpenter and decorated World War II veteran shows up at the house of his father, Eduardo Rosato, who had abandoned him and his mother in Italy in 1920 to start a new life and family for himself in Chicago. Silvio's Italian-American half-siblings, Eddie and Ida, are fascinated by this stranger who has suddenly appeared in their lives. Handsome, assured, and accomplished, there is something not quite right, something sinister about this visitor, with his air of familiarity and the distant, impenetrable look in his eyes. At first glance a classic tale of immigrant families, of the lives they build in the new world and the lives they leave behind in the old, there is something more at play here than the conflict of a nostalgia for a romanticized past confronting the excitement of a brighter future. Which of Eduardo's families is "legitimate" – the one he abandoned in Italy or the one he raised in America? He has constructed an identity based on a fabric of self-serving opportunist lies for both, fictions that rapidly disintegrate under the steady gaze and relentless demand of what appears to be his only legitimate heir. Refusing to acknowledge Eduardo as his father, Silvio dislocates the question of legitimacy from one of paternity and history to one of individual responsibility and action. But it's not just Eduardo that's in trouble here. Can Silvio attain the legitimacy he considers his due without destroying the members of both families? And does he have the right to create his own sense of legitimacy at the cost of destroying the lives of all those around him? If so, how is he any less of a monster than his father? This mystery begins Hellfire Pass, part one of Vittorio Rossi's autobiographical A Carpenter's Trilogy, A Chronicle in Three Plays.

Hellfire Pass 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: 2 female, 5 male

What people say:

"A powerful, memorable drama…" — Variety

"Hellfire Pass is what great theater can be – humorous, powerful and poignant… Rossi's writing and storytelling are effective and psychologically apt." — Times Argus

"A well-structured play with memorable characters." — Montréal Mirror

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.

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