Live Theater With a Grisly Death at Its Heart

Lizzie Borden meets “The Burning Bed” in “The Angelina Project,” a play based on the true story of an abused wife who sees no way out of her predicament than to take an ax to the skull of her sleeping husband.

The killing, which occurred 90 years ago in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is being reenacted these days on the stage of the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills. The gaps in the story of Angelina and Pietro Napolitano, rather than the forensic details of their case, intrigued author Frank Canino enough to write the play and embark on a five-year campaign to get it produced.

Canino, 62, grew up in Chicago but spent most of his professional life in Canada directing plays and teaching theater at universities in Nova Scotia and Ontario.

He belatedly branched into playwriting, a long-submerged interest he had shied away from in his youth because “the idea of being alone in a room [with nothing but blank pages to fill] was terrifying.” In 1996, a Toronto producer who liked his work asked him to read a scholarly article on the Napolitano case and see if he could turn it into a play.

Angelina, a poor Italian immigrant, was 28, the mother of four children and pregnant. Her jealous, abusive husband was threatening to kill her if she didn’t prostitute herself to bring in cash. She killed him, turned herself in and served 12 years in prison. By then, her children were gone, adopted with no trail to follow.

A gap in the story fired Canino’s imagination: about two hours elapsed between the killing and Angelina’s asking a neighbor to summon the police.

He envisioned Angelina spending a final peaceful, loving hour with her children. Canino says the play quotes verbatim what she told the police: “Here I am. Take me. I am ready to die.”

The play imagines Pietro as a man brutalized by anti-immigrant prejudice who takes out his anger on Angelina and the children. It hinges not only on the murder story, but on the quest, decades later, of a troubled, middle-aged woman named Amelia Covello to research the case for her graduate school thesis. Along the way, she discovers that she is the granddaughter of Angelina and Pietro. The truth, pried from her mother after a lifetime of secrecy, promises to set Amelia free from her miserable, emotionally barren marriage.

Before writing the play, Canino studied domestic abuse issues. He watched “The Burning Bed,” the 1984 television movie, also based on a true story, that starred Farrah Fawcett as a Michigan mother of three who torched the sleeping husband who had beaten her for years.

“I was fascinated by what happens when there is something in a family that is kept secret. The abuse doesn’t get resolved in one generation. It is a heritage” that gets passed on, Canino said. “It was very disturbing to read some of the material and, from the little I knew about my own family, to make some of those connections.”

He thinks audiences and casts have been making those connections, too.

“Every time there has been at least one person who came up to me privately and said, ‘You know what I found out about my family? You won’t believe it.’ And then you’d [hear about] a skeleton out of the closet.”

To underscore how the past is always present, and how domestic violence is a perennial blot on the human condition, Canino has his play jump suddenly and repeatedly between Angelina’s drama deep in the past and her descendant’s contemporary search for the truth. The playwright also adds a fantastical mythic overlay: at times, Angelina turns into Clytemnestra, the ancient Greek queen who vengefully kills her husband in Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon.”

“The tough issue was whether I could keep the story clear,” said director Darryl B. Hovis. From the comments [after the first three performances last weekend], the audience was confused in the first act but all the pieces were put together in the second act, which is how Frank wanted it.”

Canino expects to be in the audience this weekend, flying in from his new home outside New York City to see the first West Coast production of his play. His journey with “The Angelina Project” has taken him from Toronto, where the script was published last year by Guernica Editions, to Connecticut, where the play recently had a student production at the University of Hartford, to Sarasota, Fla., where a small professional company, the 173-seat Florida Studio Theater, gave it a staged reading last month. Canino says the reading went well and that the Sarasota company, which claims to have the largest subscription base of any American theater of its size, is considering mounting the play’s premiere production next year (the Chance’s amateur staging is not the official premiere).

Canino says he moved to New York after more than 25 years in Canada partly because it is a better vantage point for pursuing a playwriting career. The thought of writing in solitude no longer holds any terror.

“Now,” he says, “I love it and need it.”

* “The Angelina Project,” Chance Theater, 5576 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends July 15. $13 to $15. (714) 777-3033 or https://www.chancetheater.com.