Love Street Theater brings a poignant Italian-American comedy to life

The cast of Lou Pallotta’s Italian-family dinner-theater comedies used to get so boisterous and familiar with one another, both on- and offstage, that audiences would check with them: “You’re all family for real, right?”

They actually weren’t, but they formed an honorary family, Pallotta said. Inspired by Portland’s long running “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” comedy, veteran actor Pallotta decided to spin stories about his own upbringing in Brooklyn, N.Y., and he went hunting for the best ethnic-Italian actors in Portland to bring his memories to authentic life.

The cast dined together before the show; they swapped stories and jokes and tributes to East Coast ancestors and Old World great-ancestors; when they got on stage to perform in Pallotta’s corny mystery-comedies, “Who Stole My Dead Husband?” and “Why Can’t You Stay Dead?” it was as if the same rowdy behavior simply continued, uninterrupted, while an audience appeared and started laughing.

“There was a delightful dynamic between us that always translated to the stage. That’s what kept bringing people back” while those shows ran for years, Pallotta said. “We’re still very close. We’ve all been baptized by lasagna.”

They’re still so close, in fact, that when Pallotta and his wife, Melinda, decided to stage another popular Italian-family comedy at their Love Street Theater, they invited their honorary Portland-Italian acting family to Woodland to do the honors again.

“Over the River and Through the Woods,” by Joe Di Pietro, “is the perfect show for Lou’s cast,” said Melinda Pallotta, who founded Love Street in 2007 and is the director of this play.

“It’s about family, faith and food,” she said. “You see that all through the show. The grandparents are trying to impart this to their grandson, who doesn’t get it until later. He wants to break away. He has dinner with them every Sunday and he loves them, but he wants to move on.

“It’s about that pull and push,” Melinda Pallotta said. “The younger generation wants to do something else. The older generation can’t let their children go. I think there’s something for everyone in this story.”

Sounds serious, doesn’t it? It gets that way, occasionally. This reporter caught the same play at Vancouver’s Magenta Theater in 2011 and found it both deeply touching and totally hilarious. Melinda Pallotta agreed: “I get goose bumps and I laugh hysterically,” she said. “It is so much fun.”

“It’s an Italian banquet of all the emotions and passions,” Lou Pallotta added. And there’s added authenticity thanks to the genuine family heirlooms that the cast has contributed to the set, Melinda Pallotta said — like an electric Saint Anthony statuette. Plug him in and he glows, Lou Pallotta said.

“There is a richness and something very timely in the telling of this immigrant story,” he said.

Side by side

Family, faith and food help bind together every ethnicity, of course, and struggles between old-fashioned ancestors and adventurous descendants are universal. That’s why the Pallottas are sure this very East Coast comedy — it’s set in Hoboken, N.J. — will play well with theatergoers in Woodland.

Director Melinda Pallotta laughed that her own ethnic upbringing couldn’t be more different than her husband’s: “Waspy white. I am even waspier and whiter than the Pacific Northwest. I grew up on a farm in Illinois.”

Lou Pallotta grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with an accordion-playing, band-leading father who was friendly with famous Italian entertainers like Jerry Vale and Jimmy Roselli, he said. The family’s ethnic identity was keen, he said, but so was awareness of all the other ethnic identities that lived side by side in New York City.

“We celebrated being Italians,” he said. “But we never had a Sunday dinner without bringing food over to our Jewish neighbors. It was a wonderful example of being within your own culture, but extending friendship and sharing.”