Interview with Carl Capotoro

Carl Capotorto has an impressive list of accomplishments as a playwright and actor. His most recent credit is in John Turturro’s Mac, in which he plays a major role as the artist brother, Bruno.

A second generation Italian American, Carl was born in Bronx, New York, where he went to public schools and then on to the State University of New York, where he majored in writing. After his undergraduate work, he studied at Columbia University, where he earned an advanced degree in play writing.

He has appeared in several feature films. His plays have been produced by the Yale Repertory Theater, the Eugine O’neil National Playwright’s Conference, the Theater for New York City, the West Bank Cafe, as well as a number of other theatrical groups.

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

He is currently in Los Angeles on a one-year screen writing fellowship from Chesterfield Film Company, in corporation with Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment to write two screenplays for Universal/Amblin.

Carl was kind enough to sit with me for an hour last month to discuss his role in Mac and to explore Italian-American and multi-cultural themes.

His writing career took a significant turn one semester when one of his writing teachers noticed the abundance of dialogue in his short stories and encouraged him to write a play.

“I hear these very New York Italian American voices and rhythms that fill my head,” Carl explained. “Those are the voices that are always spinning. They are easy to write, and why I started writing in the first place.”

In an early play entitled Your Dream House Carl wrote perceptively about Italian Americans and their values. Though not autobiographical, the play is about an elderly couple from New York who retire and move to a remote part of Florida, where they purchase their dream house.

Not long after they leave their old friends and secure social surroundings of their old neighborhood, their dream house, filled with all the latest gadgets, begins to fall apart, sliding into a sink hole. Without their knowledge, the house was built over a swamp.

Carl explained that the play is “about attaining the dream that the couple had all their life in New York.” Their desire to move up in American society is very much like all the second and third generation inner-city Italian Americans who dream of that house in the suburbs. Carl’s characters “had in New York a sturdy little house with all their friends around them. But is was not enough. Nothing is enough.”

From themes in his writing, we turned our attention to Mac and Italian Americans in the cinema. I was eager to ask him about his personal experiences with racial conflict as he grew up in New York, specifically Italian American youths’ response to racial tensions.

To the detriment of Italians in America, this theme has received considerable attention in the cinema in recent years by a variety of directors.

“Unfortunately,” he explained, “a lot of Italian kids were the worst offenders. They fancied themselves very tough. And for some reason, there was a real streak of racism in them.”

He confessed that this was a terrible thing to have to admit, even though he felt that the street toughs did not by any means represent the majority of Italians he grew up with in New York.

Carl admitted that this would be a tough subject to write about. He betrayed a certain ambivalence about the whole issue. “I would like to eventually write about it. Maybe there is not enough distance or something yet. I don’t know how I would treat it. I would probably like to explore it. It is very difficult for me to see Italian American culture portrayed in such conflicts as Bensonhurst and Howard Beach.”

Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing are based on incidents between Italians and African-Americans in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach.

We seem to agree that in Jungle Fever, Lee did not go far enough in exploring Italian American consciousness. The reason for this is simple: Lee is not Italian and cannot grasp the subtlety of the issue for Italian Americans, especially considering, as Carl said, “our being so close to the semislavery of being southern Italians.” Few non-Italians are aware of the grinding poverty that has plagued the south of Italy and Sicily for centuries.

“These people” {Italian Americans in New York’s boroughs}, Carl said, “feel on the fringe. They have their tiny little place that is theirs and they are going to protect it against anyone. For whatever reason, someone with skin darker than theirs is a threat. I have my own ideas about why this may be. A lot of Italian Americans are anxious about what we are. Where not quite white, but where not Hispanic either. There is the fear that they’re overcompensating for the fact that they don’t know exactly where they fit.

“In the film Jungle Fever Spike Lee played with this a little. I was excited to see someone deal with it. Frankie in the film, a Sicilian, had to defend his whiteness. His mother is very dark and his girlfriend keeps leaving him for these very WASPish looking guys.”

Often people of color in America argue that Italians are no longer an ethnic group and that the success we are finally beginning to experience in America is the result of our deciding that we are white.

The truth is that Italians have succeeded in this country not because we have emulated our white neighbors, but because we have operated on a different system of values. An important aspect of that value system is that it is far more inclusive of other groups than the racist stereotyping of Italians we often see in the cinema and media.

In Mac, John Turturro came closer to the truth of the Italian American experience than any film in memory. The most sympathetic relationship in the film is between Mac and Nat, one of the African American workers.

“Turturro,” Carl said. “Was trying to show people are linked by class and condition. All these working class guys are struggling. They are linked by their love of work. Nat takes the same kind of pride in his work. He is a guy with skill.”
Carl explained that Turturro was forced, lamentably, to cut a very interesting scene in the film that reinforces this connection among the workers. In this scene, Mac was looking for more brick layers. He explains to his co-workers that it must be an Italian, because only Italians know how to lay brick, and not a black or any other ethnic group. As he is pontificating on the subject, Nat walks by, and Mac says to the men around him. “Now there’s a brick layer.”

“I see it all the time,” Carl said. “People stereotype people. But if they know them it’s another matter.”

Mac is about what happens when people are engaged in a common endevor and share the same values, regardless of their differences.

Carl pointed out that an important Italian American theme in the film is the intimate family relationship that the three brothers share. I pointed out the bathroom scene, in which one brother is on the toilet, another in the bathtub, and the other is shaving--all in a room without floor space for more than one person.

But Carl was quick to add, “I grew up in a one bathroom apartment, but what is distinct about that? All immigrant groups grew up that way. All groups in New York. We are all the same.”

Kenneth Scambray

 

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