Italian American Reconciliation – 05 October 2025

John Patrick Shanley delivers a crisp, tight script detailing the story of Huey (Wade McCollum) and Janice (Linda Manning)’s love through the eyes of Huey’s charmingly single best friend Aldo (Robert Farrier). The story begins with a prologue from a confident Aldo explaining that he’s going to tell a story that’s meant to teach us something. As far as Aldo knows, Huey and Janice’s love story came to a permanent conclusion, yet, in the end, Aldo’s lesson was about the importance of love. In a final scene after Aldo’s exit, the audience sees Huey and Janice connecting on Janice’s terrace, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the last, or perhaps somewhere in the middle. It seems Shanley’s real lesson is not only about the importance of love, but also about the mystery of it, and how each relationship can only truly be understood by its individual participants.

Much of the plot centers around questions of what it means to be a man, and many conversations center around gender. While the men seem to define manhood in terms of internal strength, the women seem unwilling to define womanhood, repeatedly stating that the actions of one woman are not a reflection on all women the way that the men seem to oversimplify them to be. Supporting ladies Teresa (Mia Gentile) and Aunt May (Mary Testa) astutely point out that one woman attempting to kill a man doesn’t mean that all women want that man dead. For a story that centers so specifically around manhood, it is interesting that Aldo tells Huey that he loves him so early in the play. Aldo doesn’t mean it in a romantic or sexual way, and Huey says it back in the same spirits. This defies a lot of stereotypes about men not being able to admit when they love someone and about men not being able to forge close connections with other men. It feels as though this opening scene is meant to deliberately let the audience know that Shanley intends to discuss men from a truthful lens, and not from a societal one. There are many moments in the show when characters indicate a preference for the truth over the words they want to hear; Shanley models that in the script.

Every performance in this production is polished, and Mia Gentile and Mary Testa, as the representatives of women, are particularly effective. Gentile’s flustered youthfulness artfully taken out on the utensils, cups, and plates, painted a picture of women’s internal strength. Though she did fold momentarily in her break up conversation with Huey, she embodied a woman who made a decision to leave when it was right for her and had the strength and resolve to do what was in her own best interests. Testa played the aunt who stayed behind to explain it all, and her no-nonsense perspective as a widow could easily have made her pitiable; instead, Aunt May provided genuine guidance for Aldo, and was compassionate while also maintaining firm boundaries that protected her, Teresa, and womankind at large. Testa’s delivery was spot on, and her talent shone unmistakably as she found ways to emphasize the hidden gems in Shanley’s text without seeming over-the-top.

The design elements were minimal but well executed. Director Austin Pendleton made very effective use of the space and Scott Aronow’s scenic design. Lighting (Annie Garrett-Larsen) guided us to which part of the set to focus on, and costuming (Ariel Pellman) kept us firmly grounded in the time period and also guided our eye on what is and isn’t normal for this particular world. Italian American Reconciliation seemed to be a world within itself, and this production at The Flea very effectively took us completely out of our own world to dwell in the world of the story. I did not fully understand the need for Aldo’s entrance from the audience in which he gave out a quarter, a dollar, and a red rose. I expected those jokes to come back somewhere, but they didn’t. Yet other than this starting moment, Italian American Reconciliation never wasted a word. All of the ideas were wrapped up in each other, with characters complementing and challenging each other’s ideas with a very special, Italian American brand of love.

Written and set in the late 1980’s, John Patrick Shanley’s Italian American Reconciliation infuses humor into a conversation about sexism that is ahead of its time. The characters are true to life, and their messages are still vitally important in a world that is still trying to categorize and clarify the alleged mysteries of gender and sex. As Aldo rightly concludes, life isn’t about gender—it’s about relationships with individual people and choosing those who give you love in a way that you can understand, appreciate, and share.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Spin Cycle.