By Ron Cohen

 

Phrase of the day is deus ex machina. Don’t bother clicking on or getting out your dictionary. Borrowed from the Greek, it translates literally as “god from the machine” and has evolved into a dramaturgic term referring to an unexpected or surprising – maybe even illogical -- turn of plot that resolves or changes a thorny problem.

 

And playwright Meghan Kennedy has come up with a doozie of a deus ex machina for her initially meandering, ultimately rewarding family drama, Napoli, Brooklyn, being given a caring production by Roundabout Theatre Company.

 

Based on an actual happening, the cataclysmic event comes literally crashing out of the blue a little more than halfway through Kennedy’s script. It nearly jolts the audience out of their seats and catapults her storytelling onto an elevated level, questioning the randomness of fate and its impact on the shaping of our lives.

 

 

However, from the moment we meet them in 1960, the Muscolino brood, an Italian-American family living in Brooklyn, is pretty much in shambles. The father, Nic, who came to America from Naples as a stowaway, has an easily combustible temper. A violent fight with the eldest of his three daughters, 26-year-old Tina, has put her first into a hospital and then into a convent as a ward.

 

The middle daughter, 20-year-old Vita, has sacrificed her life to the family, forsaking schooling to bring home a salary from her work in a tile factory. Now she is filled with guilt that she froze and was unable to come to the defense of her sister. The youngest daughter, 16-year-old Francesca, is awash in mutually amorous feelings for her girlfriend Connie, and the two are plotting to run off to Paris, where they can express their sexuality openly.

 

 

Meanwhile, the mother, Luda (short for Ludovica), is caught up in feelings of lostness. Nic ignores her, can be brutal and is unfaithful, while her daughters are becoming people she does not know. She can no longer cry and has turned to onion-slicing in a vain attempt to induce tears. She also has to deal with her own reactions to the polite but obvious advances made by the neighborhood butcher, Albert Duffy, an Irish-American widower who happens to be Connie’s father.

 

Under Gordon Edelstein’s skillful direction, these tribulations are spelled out through a series of brief scenes unfolding during the play’s first half. However, the continual shifting of locales, while clearly delineated on Eugene Lee’s atmospheric set, and the brevity of the scenes themselves, lend the storytelling a choppy, remote feeling, Things, however, come together wonderfully with breathtaking intensity in the play’s second half, particularly during an extended Christmas eve dinner scene. Nic’s attempt to change into a caring, well-mannered person, after the tragedy in the neighborhood, comes to naught; tensions between him, his family and his dinner guests – the butcher Duffy and Tina’s friend from work, an African-American woman named Celia – explode into unrestrained hostility, and yet lead credibly to the play’s gentler conclusion.

 

A responsive eight-person cast helps fortify the writing’s sense of truth. Jordyn DiNatale as Francesca, Lilli Kay as Tina and Elise Kibler as Vita paint distinctive portraits as the three sisters, giving urgency to their individual plights while maintaining the sense of sisterhood. Michael Rispoli’s Nic lets us see the man’s positive qualities – a self-pride and self-awareness -- as well as his brutality.

 

Particularly outstanding is the beautifully restrained performance of Alyssa Bresnahan as Luda, eschewing familiar Italian flamboyance for a moving depiction of troubled but inherent dignity. She even makes the somewhat precious talking to an onion totally acceptable.

 

There is also well-defined work by Erik Lochtefeld as the butcher, Juliet Brett as his daughter Connie, and Shirine Babb as Tina’s factory friend Celia, who is also touched by tragedy.

 

Kennedy, whose earlier play, Too Much, Too Much, Too Many, received a Roundabout Underground Production in 2013, may not be the most familiar name in the rolls of emerging female playwrights. However, she is writing under commission from three prestigious theater companies, Williamstown Theater Festival and Geffen Playhouse as well as Roundabout. Her writing in Napoli, Brooklyn, demonstrates why, revealing a classic probing of the meaning of family, the conflicting dimensions of love and the shadowy influence of fate upon destiny.

 

Her affection for her characters is another important quality, and her writing sometimes shimmers with an unforced poetic beauty. Some of Luda’s longer speeches, such as her colorful description of Vita’s birth on the kitchen table, could well become fodder for auditions calling for Italian-type mamas. Even Luda’s closing speech, in which Kennedy somewhat baldly attempts to shape the play into a feminist-colored statement on the resiliency of womanhood, has – like the best parts of Napoli, Brooklyn -- an affecting vibrancy.

 

Off-Broadway play

Playing at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Center for Theatre

111 West 46^th Street

212-719-1300

roundabouttheatre.org

Playing until September 3