Scarpone

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan.

In an interview prior to the March 1990 production of Scarpone, Rossi
noted that he had not yet met with rejection of his work. Indeed Little
Blood Brother (1986) and Backstreets (1987) had won Quebec Drama
Festival awards and gone on to off-off-Broadway production. His first
full-length play, The Chain, had been (as they say) “boffo” for
Centaur Theatre’s Twentieth Anniversary season in 1989. The charm on
Rossi’s career continued as he was named writer-in-residence at
Concordia University for the Fall 1990 semester.

One must admit that this playwright has proven adept at taking elements
of the life he knows (the Italian Ville Emard district near LaSalle) and
adapting them for his dramatic writing. So with Scarpone: it is set in a
fashionable shoe store (the experience being drawn from the author’s
six years part-time in the Bay’s ladies’ shoe department), with a
mixed population of Montreal’s anglophones and francophones joining
his familiar Italian characters.

Alas, what Rossi delivers this time is a latter-day Chips with
Everything, where the only gravy is a kind of harsh comedy derived from
characters with tunnel vision, befitting traditional farce. The sordid
little plot involves company rules and politics, and a mounting panic
about job security amid rumors of takeovers and closures. More
disturbing is the complacent revelling in a nasty kind of chauvinism
(surely the Italians are tired of this stereotype!). “Insensitive”
describes the play quite aptly.