A family dinner is its own kind of choreography – and staging that dance is keeping director Antoni Cimolino pretty busy.
In the rehearsal room for Saturday, Sunday, Monday, he coordinates performers around a dining table as they pass plates, rise from their chairs, cut one another off, and thread overlapping conversations through the rituals of a shared meal.
A gentle guitar will accompany the scene in Stratford’s production of Eduardo De Filippo’s play. Yet Cimolino is listening just as closely to the silences: the communal pause as everyone tastes the food, or the sudden hush after a dig arrests the conversation.
“The choreography isn’t simply movement; it’s sound,” he explains. “It is very much like an orchestral piece. There are several instruments, and each one of them has its own musical range and particular thematic function.” Several indeed, one might add: the play counts 17 speaking roles, and with the non-speaking performers included, Stratford’s cast swells to 26.
The crowded household – with relatives, friends, and several generations under one roof – belongs to the Priore clan at the centre of this 1959 Neapolitan comedy. Over the course of a weekend, the preparation and serving of a Sunday meal become the backdrop to marital jealousy and a family crisis.
The production will open in the second part of August, and carries the quiet weight of a farewell. It will be Cimolino’s final show as the festival’s artistic director, closing a 14-year chapter at the helm. For the occasion, he has returned to a playwright who has accompanied him through nearly three decades at Stratford. His relationship with De Filippo began in 1997, when Filumena marked his solo directing debut. He later directed Napoli Milionaria! in 2018 and Grand Magic in 2023. Now, for him, preparing Saturday, Sunday, Monday “is like coming home.”
Yet translating the play, and making its cultural world tangible to Canadian audiences, is no piece of pastiera. Steeped in the conventions of mid-century Italy, the script evokes a Naples in the midst of postwar Italy’s rapid social transformation. “These domestic situations belong to a world before legal abortion, before the pill, and before divorce was even legal in Italy,” Cimolino notes. “It is not something that feels immediate to contemporary audiences across the board.”
Working closely with Queen’s University professor Donato Santeramo, he has developed a new English version of the play, weighing what meanings to preserve and which references need recasting. Traduttore, traditore, runs the Italian warning: every translator is also a traitor. Cimolino, though, offers a cheerful rejoinder. “De Filippo himself translated Shakespeare’s The Tempest into Neapolitan, so he was a believer in translation after all.”
Over the years, De Filippo’s work has given Cimolino both a way of engaging with his Italian inheritance and a means of widening Stratford’s classical repertoire. He considers De Filippo one of the 20th century’s essential dramatists and has often called him the Italian Chekhov. “He is critically important to the repertoire of any company that claims to do the classics from around the world,” Cimolino says. Bringing De Filippo to Stratford has thus been more than a personal project. It has challenged a canon long shaped, as Cimolino puts it, by “a very Anglophone perspective, mixed with Molière.”
Much like Chekhov, De Filippo turns seemingly ordinary exchanges into windows onto economic pressure and emotional crisis. And he does so while speaking directly to popular audiences. (Cimolino still smiles at the memory of a visit to Naples when, after he mentioned Napoli Milionaria! to a taxi driver, the man immediately began reciting lines from the play.)
But De Filippo remains far less familiar outside Italy, and Cimolino has played an outsized role in making the case for him in Canada. He has approached the Neapolitan author with the same line-by-line scrutiny he would bring to Shakespeare. For the upcoming production, he has even tried to align the play’s diegetic chronology with Italy’s calendar of feast days. Imagining the action set in March, he places it “near Saint Joseph’s Day – the perfect husband,” setting Joseph’s model of marital virtue against the Othello-like jealousy tormenting Peppino, the Priore pater familias.
But that rigour does not mean treating the play as a cultural artifact sealed off from contemporary Canada. “I try to use colour-conscious casting,” Cimolino says, “so we can believe brothers are brothers, and sisters are sisters, while bringing as much diversity to the cast as possible.” The approach reflects Stratford’s broader reckoning with systemic racism, which took on new urgency in 2020 as Black artists spoke publicly about their experiences and the Festival reconsidered how racialized performers were cast and supported.
Asked what makes the play resonate today, Cimolino points to the fallibility of communication. “Honesty is difficult,” he says, “it is embarrassing because it compromises the way we appear in front of others.” The Priores live almost on top of one another, but proximity hardly makes them easier to understand, either between husband and wife or across generations. “Sometimes parents want to keep their children close, while their children want their independence.”
For Cimolino, that tension has a personal resonance. He has spoken candidly about stepping down to make more room in his life for his family – for his son and granddaughter in Halifax, and his daughter in Taiwan. As he prepares to spend more time with his far-flung family, he stages a play in which proximity does not guarantee closeness. This production is a farewell with the taste of a return.
That symmetry runs even deeper. Cimolino first encountered De Filippo through Saturday, Sunday, Monday, in a CentreStage production he saw in the 1980s. Now, as his Stratford tenure draws to a close, the play brings that journey full circle. But arrivederci does not mean adieu. Cimolino may be leaving the festival’s top job, but his conversation with De Filippo is far from over.
The world premiere translation of Saturday, Sunday, Monday begins performances August 4, with official opening August 22. It runs to October 24 at Stratford’s Avon Theatre.
For tickets: https://www.stratfordfestival.ca/WhatsOn/PlaysAndEvents/Production/Saturday-Sunday-Monday
To learn more about The Stratford Festival: www.stratfordfestival.ca
