Fringe no more

>> Playwright Steve Galluccio hits the big time with Mambo Italiano

by AMY BARRATT

Ever since Compagnie Jean-Duceppe put his play Mambo Italiano in their season (it opens Dec. 13), Steve Galluccio has been hearing one question over and over: "Where have you been hiding?"

Where Galluccio has been, of course, is languishing in anglo obscurity. Not that he didn't have his successes in English. The author of Sexual Success in Montreal and Peter 'N' Paul get Mary'd, among others, he was the unofficial king of the Fringe throughout the early '90s. But doing fringe theatre in cramped spaces with folding chairs is a far cry from getting produced in a subscription season in one of the biggest houses in town.

"Did they read the right script?" Galluccio admits asking himself when he first heard Duceppe was interested in producing his play.

They had indeed read the right script, translated into French by no less a luminary than Michel Tremblay. Reportedly, when Tremblay brought it to them, some people at Duceppe thought he was playing a trick: that Mambo Italiano was in fact a new Tremblay play.

If we haven't heard much from Galluccio in the theatre scene recently it's because he has been working in French-language TV for the past four years. These days, he's dividing his time between sitting in on rehearsals at Duceppe and developing a sitcom in English.

In Mambo Italiano, Angelo, a closeted gay man, comes out to his Italian family. The play is basically about the fall-out of that impulsive act, for Angelo and his lover Nino, and the whole famiglia.

The trilingual Galluccio is clearly enjoying his entry into the "establishment" and the respect he's finding as an artist on the French side. As an English playwright in Montreal, he realized he would never be taken seriously unless his plays had been produced elsewhere. The English here, he says, are always looking for validation from outside. "The attitude is, 'How could you be any good? You haven't even been to Ottawa.'" Ironically, when producers from Toronto and the rest of Canada come sniffing around for new talent, they invariably look at the French, not the English scene.

"In Quebec, in order to have an international career," says the 30-something playwright, "you have to go through French." Galluccio says it's due to the production at Duceppe that he now has an agent in Toronto trying to sell the play in English Canada and the U.S.

As for his upward mobility from tiny houses to ginormous Duceppe, Galluccio isn't worried that his play will be lost in space. In fact, he says his plays were never that suited to "intimate" spaces; they merely played there because in the old days of self-production, that's what he could afford. Galluccio never went in for the pared-down, one- or two-person plays that tend to characterize the Fringe. His work runs to big casts and lots of locations and Mambo Italiano is no exception. The Duceppe production is the first one of any of his plays that has the means to create all those different settings with a measure of realism. His eyes light up when he talks about the revolving set created for this production and--I guess you can't completely take the Fringe out of the boy--"real furniture!" :

Comments? Amytheatre@aol.com

Mambo Italiano, Dec 13-20 and Jan 4-Feb 3, 2001 at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe of Place des Arts, 842-2112