SACCO & VANZETTI’S DIVINE COMEDY

FROM PLAYWRIGHT KEVIN RICE…

Sacco And Vanzetti’s Divine Comedy is a deeply personal play and the writing of it has taken me close to my roots.

I’ve been interested in Sacco and Vanzetti since I was sixteen when I first heard of their trial and execution. My love of history and my interest in their story must have started around age twelve when I read A Nation of Immigrants by John F. Kennedy. In the course of my research on this play I learned that Nicola Sacco lived the happiest years of his short life in my hometown of Milford, Mass. where he met and married his wife, Rosina. At the time of his arrest, Nicola and Rosina had a six-year old son, Dante, and Rosina was pregnant with their second child, a daughter, Ines, who only ever got to meet her father in prison.

A 16-year old Nicola Sacco emigrated in 1908 from the Foggia region of Puglia, Italy, disembarked in Boston and headed straight to Milford where he was welcomed by the many Foggiani who had made that their home in the new country. Today this natural chain migration of humans is decried by some as if it is an evil phenomenon. But was not when their forebears arrived? The play draws from the current lexicon of present fearmongers, ie, describing immigration as “an invasion” requiring military action to fend it off.

The Town of Milford and Italian language and culture had no problem dominating my Irish half. My father was an only child in contrast to my mother, the youngest of six children of Maria and Giuseppe Legge who emigrated to Milford, Mass. from Puglia, Italy in 1915. The Legges lived on Pond Street in the Italian section of Milford known as the Plains.

It was only in the last six months that I read that Sacco, too, lived in one of four houses on Pond Street and that it’s quite likely that he got to know my grandparents, maybe at one of the many parties or Sunday family dinners on that little street.

My connection with Vanzetti was less visceral but grew as I wrote this play and dug into his life. Vanzetti, the reader, the man of the street, at the time of his arrest he, a fishmonger, but for all his life he sang on the streets where he peddled love and humanity, a man with a passionate belief in Anarchy as the right way, the only way to free people from the cruelty and dystopia of government as he and Sacco experienced it. Make no mistake: Sacco and Vanzetti worked and fought for anarchy. What they did not do, however, was rob and murder for it.

It was one year ago that I bumped into the acclaimed American playwright, Paula Vogel, who kindly asked me what I was writing of late. I answered, “A play about Sacco and Vanzetti.” And then I added, “It may sound crazy, but I’m writing it as a comedy.” She answered: “It has to be… it’s the only way you’ll get an audience.”

The other way to get an audience: find an Artistic Director like Christopher Ostrom and a theater like the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater brave enough to risk producing an original play, one whose story of opposition to fascism, racism and mistreatment of immigrants resonates with much that is going on in this country of late. Likewise, big thanks to the masterful director, Tim Habeger who jumped in and made it come alive; to my good friend, Dan Lombardo who encouraged me from the start; and to dramaturg Ali Keller who helped guide me through the twists and turns of a complex story compressed into one day; to the super talented cast; to my wife, Marla, for her unending support; and, lastly, to the brilliant Michael Sottile whose songs and music brought to the play the light and joy that both Sacco and Vanzetti harbored throughout their dreadful internment, right up to their execution in the electric chair.

I hope that this attempt to use comedy — and music — to tell Sacco and Vanzetti’s story does not detract from my ultimate goal, that the audience leave the theater remembering the oft-repeated maxim that the only way not repeat the mistakes of the past is by remembering history. And taking action necessary to deny it from being repeated.  – Kevin Rice