Calling Italian-Americans!

When he was interviewing for his job at Long Wharf, director Eric Ting read up on the layered history of New Haven’s Italian-American heritage. So he has long wanted to mount John Patrick Shanley’s Italian American Reconciliation, which is also a play he loves.

Ting (pictured) is getting his chance, as the romantic comedy about the glories of losers at love opens on April 27, the last show of the Long Wharf’s current season. Ting and the Long Wharf staff are inviting anyone with pictures and/or stories of growing up Italian in the Elm City to send them in. Some of those artifacts and tales just may end up on the Long Wharf website, in a lobby video, or even as part of the stage setting.

U.S. Rep Rosa DeLauro has already sent hers in. Capisce?

The place to go is this site. where you can learn more about sending stuff in.

In a brief interview in his office, Ting said that Shanley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonstruck and many other works, had written in ​“Reconciliation” a play that is hardly restricted to young love as experienced by Italians strutting their Soprano-esque stuff in the Little Italy, New York City, of the 1980s.

“There’s a universal sensibility about love,” he said.

In the play, one Huey Maximilian Bonifigliano has a fixation on Janice, from whom he’s divorced and but can’t leg go. Janice is mainly intent on shooting him and his good friend and hapless accomplice Aldo.

Or as Ting put: ​“What it has to say is about love, how love digs its fingers in and doesn’t let go — the worst thing is to get stuck. So much of this play is about trying to move forward.”

The play is also about stories, mainly stories people tell each other about what has happened, and what is happening. And the words come pouring out of these street smart people at a poetical volume.

That’s possibly what drew Ting deeply to the text as well. ​“It’s a paen to language as a method of purging and confessing. Putting it out into the air.”

Because the language is in the service of Aldo and Huey and their women trying to figure out what the words mean to them, Ting called the play ​“more Shakespearean than Commedia dell’arte.”

That said, it’s also, of course, about the immigrant dilemma as well. He said that in Little Italy, where the play is set, by one story he’s heard there are hardly any people left whose ancestors came from Italy.

In New Haven, the descendants of the Amalfitani, Marchgiani, and other southern Italian populations who fueled the turn of the 20th century industries of New Haven now live largely in the suburbs. Still, they are clearly drawn to the drama that enfolded for their parents and grandparents, as evidenced by the dozens of pictures and stories being sent in to Long Wharf.

Here director of marketing Steve Scarpa showed a digital contribution sent in by one Alpha Coiro to the Long Wharf website. The sender only indicated that the photo of the turn-of-the century child was taken by a photographer named Pietro Simone. His studio was located at 888 Grand Ave.

Ting confessed that ​“stereotyping” was a considerable worry. ​“We cast actors who bring levels of complexities to the roles,” he said.

To add to an interesting mix, one of the characters, Aunt May, is a Latino actress.

Anchoring the universal love story are complexities that Ting said distill down to what it means to be Italian American today. Or as he put it, what happens to the hyphen in Italian-American. With each successive generation, he suggested, it changes and eventually that hyphen disappears.

Shanley’s title, he noted, has no hyphen.

On the other hand, John Patrick Shanley is Irish.