In Piazza San Domenico

Steve Galluccio's newest stage triumph, In Piazza San Domenico, is a comedy of errors that takes place in a bustling neighbourhood of 1952 Naples.

This two-act play recounts the story of how one broken engagement ripples throughout friends and family, affecting all of their respective love lives in different ways. The young and beautifully earthy Carmelina faints in the arms of the town philanderer, Tonino, setting off a wave of malicious gossip that seems to infect everyone in town with second thoughts about their current partners-and inexplicable desires for new ones-as often as not consummated on that shadowed spot of carpet behind the statue of San Francesco in the church on the town square. Finally, as if the very gods are angry with these salacious goings-on, an earthquake hits the town, sending the characters into the piazza and keeping them there for the night with a series of ominous aftershocks. As the sun rises, misunderstandings are resolved, the truth is revealed, and hardened hearts yield to the eternally verdant desires for life.

In a world and a time hovering between the “traditional” values and the emancipated new thinking, Italian theatrical archetypes with their roots in Roman comedies and the Commedia dell’arte evolve into the recognizable stereotypes of mid-twentieth-century society that were to become hallmarks of the whimsical Sophia Loren/Marcello Mastroianni films of the early 1960s.

Of this play, Galluccio has said: “Humour is a powerful tool that can get us through anything … the human spirit and its sense of survival is bigger than whatever society can throw at us.”