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Reprinted from A
Play on Words;
Her name is Deanna Pacelli, and she is the star of a one-woman show, ''There Goes the Neighborhood,'' which has been playing on weekends in a below-ground bar on Smith Street. The play, written by Ms. Pacelli's friend Mari Brown, is based on two years of interviews in which the two women asked local residents about the changes that have made their neighborhood a petri dish of gentrification. In the play, Ms. Pacelli switches between nine characters of different ages, races and viewpoints. Ms. Brown and Ms. Pacelli moved to New York four years ago, and the fact that neither comes from the city (Ms. Pacelli is from St. Charles, Ill., and Ms. Brown is from Rochester) was in some ways an asset. While working as waitresses at a local bar, they noticed the passion with which patrons talked about the neighborhood's transformation. They also took note of people's accents and the slang they used. ''It sounded like intact lines of dialogue coming out of their mouth,'' marveled Ms. Brown, 27. ''We knew we had a show.'' And so it was that Mr. Attianese, who generally prefers football to footlights, recently found himself in the darkened theater of BarBelow, located under an Asian fusion restaurant called Faan. A spotlight came on, illuminating Ms. Pacelli, in a baseball cap, arms folded, a suspicious frown on her face. ''We called it the street of Johns,'' she began in an unmistakable Brooklyn-Italian accent. ''Everybody who lived on the street was named John.'' Mr. Attianese recalled: ''My wife looked at me and said, 'That's you.' I was bragging about it to everyone the next day.'' A generation ago, Italian-American culture prevailed in Carroll Gardens; it is still common to see a plaster Virgin Mary adorning a front lawn, or a clutch of old men conversing in Italian on a street corner. The neighborhood may be changing, with brownstones selling for more than $1 million and restaurants earning top Zagat ratings, but some of the old rules still apply. In the play, a wide-eyed new arrival describes learning the hard way not to walk into a local pork store carrying a bag from a rival store. ''Whoa,'' he says. ''It took me 17 boxes of Thin Mints for his granddaughter to make up for that one.'' The same character also recalls seeing someone in a cafe order a coffee and Danish and get $5,000 back in change (some longtime residents may avoid talking about mob influence, but the script does not shy away from talking about it). In the play, Carroll Gardens residents evince a range of reactions to gentrification. A gay couple describe arriving in the 1980's with a bright-eyed mission to fix up the crumbling facades along Smith Street, one of the neighborhood's main arteries. Ms. Pacelli then tells the same story through the less star-struck eyes of Vinny, the character inspired by Mr. Attianese. ''These two guys, gay guys, come up to me, and say, 'We want to restore your cornice,' '' he growls slowly. ''I looked at them and said, "'Who are you? And what the hell is my cornice?'" This being a tightknit community, news of the play spread quickly, with many people seeing it repeatedly -- including some whose identities are only thinly disguised onstage. Kathryn Scinto, a longtime resident, owns Quench, the Smith Street bar where Ms. Pacelli and Ms. Brown worked and gathered much of their material. Her speech is peppered with interjections like ''Am I right?'' and ''Do you agree?'' And she launched easily into a diatribe against newcomers and their unneighborly ways (''Nowadays, the little grandmother looking out the window waiting for you, you think she's stalking you instead of looking out to see if you're O.K.'') To her former employees, the outspoken Ms. Scinto was an obvious subject for their play. She herself was not so sure. ''I was, not worried, but -- what's the word? -- concerned,'' she said. ''I was like, 'Is it going to be like making fun of you or is it going to be flattering?' '' But when customers said they recognized her in the show, she got up her nerve to go. ''I thought it was pretty funny that they had me with a glass of wine the whole time,'' she said. ''People are going to think I'm a lush. I said, 'Why couldn't you depict me with a pair of really good shoes?'" Not all the characters are Italian. There are an old Puerto Rican man, a young black D.J., a Chinese restaurant owner and a Minnesota transplant. And although many are nostalgic for the old days, not all the memories are good. A young Puerto Rican woman, Lily, recalls the excitement of being kissed on the forehead as a little girl by John Gotti at the neighborhood's annual Court Street Feast. But she also speaks of ugly race-tinged confrontations between groups of her peers, and of friends who fell into heavy drug use. With its new restaurants, boutiques and yoga classes, she says, the neighborhood is safer and more fun now. Millie Massa, the real-life Lily, talks with her hands, perhaps because she just quit smoking and needs to occupy them. ''As soon as she went to light up the cigarette, I was like, 'O.K., gosh, that's me. She's going to do me now,' '' she said. ''I've never seen anyone pretend to be me, so I was a little weirded out at first, like, 'Oh my gosh, do I really talk like that?' But she did everyone else perfectly, so she must have gotten me right.'' The only significant character alteration is the play's gay couple. Their quirky personalities are based on those of a real-life local couple, but many of their lines came from Bette Stolz, a neighborhood activist who, in the 1980's, helped get a grant to improve the neighborhood's facades and persuaded merchants to do things like sell wine out of wicker baskets instead of from behind plexiglass. Even with the gender adjustment, Ms. Stolz saw herself in the play (''Boy, did I'') and found other characters familiar as well. ''You recognize people even if you don't know them,'' she said. ''Because I guess we are all types, somehow.'' To go back to the Spring Newsletter CLICK HERE .
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©2004 Synapse Productions. All Rights Reserved. |