Three sisters (Lilli Kay, Elise Kibler, and Jordyn DiNatale face unexpected tragedy in Napoli, Brooklyn (photo by Joan Marcus)
Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 3, $99
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org
Right before intermission in Meghan Kennedy’s Napoli, Brooklyn, director Gordon Edelstein stages a spectacular, shocking event, made all the more surprising because it’s based on a little-remembered occurrence that took place in Park Slope in 1960. What came before intermission is not nearly as exciting, and what comes after might not be as fascinating as it could have been, but the event itself and its revolutionary effect on the characters’ approach to life makes it worth a trip to the downstairs Laura Pels Theatre at the Roundabout, where the show is running through September 3. The Muscolino family is led by the emotionally and physically abusive Nic (Michael Rispoli) and his worried and frightened wife, Luda (Alyssa Bresnahan), who cuts up onions to induce the tears she can’t let flow: “Why does He not let me cry? He knows I need to,” she says about God as she chops away. One of their daughters, twenty-year-old Vita (Elise Kibler), has been sent to live in a convent. Another, sixteen-year-old Francesca (Jordyn DiNatale), wants to run away with her girlfriend, Connie Duffy (Juliet Brett). And the third, twenty-six-year-old Tina (Lilli Kay), works hard in a tile factory. “What’s it like, bein’ loved?” Tina asks one of her coworkers, Celia Williams (Shirine Babb). Meanwhile, Connie’s father, Albert (Erik Lochtefeld), can’t help but flirt with Luda whenever she comes into his butcher shop. As everyone except Nic considers some kind of change in their life, a tragedy befalls the neighborhood that has each person rethinking their future.
The Feast of the Seven Fishes turns into a brawl in new Meghan Kennedy play (photo by Joan Marcus)
Napoli, Brooklyn is, for the most part, a fairly standard family drama, with not enough twists and turns aside from the major one at the end of the first act. The relationship between Francesca and Connie doesn’t feel real, and Nic is too much of a caricature. Kennedy, whose Too Much, Too Much, Too Many ran at the Roundabout Underground in 2013, doesn’t give quite enough depth to the characters as they explore their lives and debate the existence of God in the second act when they come together for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Long Wharf artistic director Edelstein (Satchmo at the Waldorf, My Name Is Asher Lev) makes good use of Eugene Lee’s functional set, in which nearly all the locations are always onstage. But the first-set closer is a doozy, so you’re likely to forgive the syrupy, message-laden narrative and leave the theater wanting to find out more about that real-life devastating catastrophe in Brooklyn that, before this play, wasn’t even a historical footnote to the vast majority of us.