Moonstruck In Lower Manhattan ITALIAN AMERICAN RECONCILIATION

They are the last ethnic group America can comfortably mock. In movies and on TV, the Italian-American male is Stanley Kowalski without the sex appeal, the female a masochistic Judy absorbing too many Punches. So it is a tonic to meet the Italian Americans in John Patrick Shanley’s plays (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea) and films (Moonstruck). The residents of Shanley’s Little Italy dare to express their feelings in street poetry whose melodic line is closer to Verdi’s than to Bon Jovi’s. In his new off-Broadway play Shanley goes further, announcing that these days it is the women who have aerobicized their hearts and the men who are love-sick. Shanley knows that men are the last dying breed of romantics. Of course: he’s Irish American.

The romantic geometry in Italian American Reconciliation is familiarly lopsided. Teresa (Laura San Giacomo) loves and is in love with Huey (John Pankow). Huey loves Teresa but is in love with his ex-wife Janice (Jayne Haynes). Janice hates Huey and just about everybody else. Nor is the world crazy about her. Teresa, who thinks Janice “should live on a black mountain and drink out of a skull,” tells Huey, “You’re spoiled by women. You think you got woman-love coming to you out of your destiny.” But who, in a Shanley comic opera, can ignore la forza del destino? Huey has to get Janice back.

To this end he enlists his best friend Aldo (John Turturro) to tame the shrew with roses and sweet talk. Cyrano did better. Janice stands on a moonlit balcony, takes a look at the flowers, snorts “What faw?” and tosses them to the ground. Her contempt stokes Aldo’s ardor and Huey’s too. As their older friend May (Helen Hanft) notes wistfully about the triumph of love over logic, “I’ll never again have the courage to be that stupid.”

In plot and production, this is Moonstruck on the cheap. But it is hardly less satisfying, with smart, authentic turns by the rumbustious Turturro and the gorgeously desperate San Giacomo. Shanley’s title is appropriate: he wants to reconcile the comic-derisive image of Italian Americans with his own comic romanticism. And like almost everyone in this poignant fable, he gets what he wants.