About the Play:

Italian American Reconciliation has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes and Male/Male Scenes.

Italian American Reconciliation is a full-length romantic comedy by John Patrick Shanley. Huey Maximilian Bonfigliano has a problem – he's still stuck on his ex-wife. Even though she ripped his heart out and left him cold over three years ago, he can't be a man again until he gets her back. Enlisting the help of his best friend Aldo, Huey woos her one final time in Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley's fanciful, light-hearted, and zestfully comic play.

Italian American Reconciliation is a fanciful, lighthearted and zestfully comic exploration of male/female relationships, and the sometimes unsettling (and very funny) complications that can ensue. Huey Maximilian Bonfigliano has a problem: While he is safely divorced from his shrewish first wife, Janice, who shot his dog and even took a bead on him, he feels he cannot regain his "manhood" until he woos and wins her one more time – if only to put his broken marriage behind him once and for all. He enlists the aid of his lifelong buddy, Aldo Scalicki, a confirmed bachelor who tries, without apparent success, to convince Huey that he would be better off sticking with his new lady friend, Teresa, a usually placid young waitress whose indignation flares when she learns what Huey is up to. In a moonlit balcony scene (hilariously reminiscent of Cyrano de Bergerac) Aldo pleads his lovesick friend's case and, to his astonishment, Janice capitulates – although not for long. However we do learn that her earlier abuse of Huey was intended to make him "act like a man" which, at last, he does. And, more than that, he (and the audience) become aware that, in the final essence, "the greatest – and only – success is to be able to love" – a truth which emerges delightfully from the heartwarming, wonderfully antic and always imaginatively conceived action of the play.

Italian American Reconciliation premiered in 1987 at the Gnu Theatre in North Hollywood and was subsequently produced in 1988 at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) off-Broadway in New York City. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 2 male

What people say:

"…an operatic, comic romance … working-class poetic." — The New York Times

"He writes wonderful Runyonesque dialogue – 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 New Yorker

"Ultimately Shanley is telling us a tall tale but he does it with so much humor, so much winsome charm that it is almost irresistible." — New York Daily News

"…bathed in the same moonlit madness that gave his Moonstruck screenplay its savor and flavor…A lovely play." — New York Post

About the Playwright:

John Patrick Shanley is an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. Shanley has written some two dozen off-Broadway plays since the 1970s, but he is best known for Doubt, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award. He has also written extensively for TV and film, and his credits include the teleplay for Live from Baghdad and screenplays for Five Corners and Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for original screenplay.