Carmela's table

At first glance a classic tale of immigrants to North America, there is something more to Vittorio Rossi's autobiographical A Carpenter's Trilogy than the conflict of a romanticized past confronting the excitement of a brighter future. Carmela's Table, part two of this chronicle, finds Silvio, the decorated Italian war hero, settled in a new suburb on Montreal with his wife, their three children and his mother, applying for immigrant status in 1957. Bristling with a cold and violent sense of outrage at the wartime horrors he survived in North Africa; his prison camp experiences in England; a bigamist father who abandoned his young family to emigrate to Chicago; betrayed by his mother who raised him and his sister in the humiliating poverty of their Italian village; it is easy for the audience to empathize with Silvio's cold-hearted need for retribution, lashing out at everyone and everything around him as the play opens. Rossi's dramatic portrait peels back the complex layers of Silvio's psyche--to reveal what drives him to his bi-polar excesses of emotion: the willfully constructed memory, the unassailable sense of honour, the judgmental dismissal of what he perceives are the faul