Produced by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc.

Dante tells us that the Gates of Hell are labeled, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate,” which means, “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” Nick Cristano might have heeded these words if he thought, for an instant, that he would be able to pop in to his grandparents’ home, make an important announcement, and leave soon, without eating. There was no chance of that happening, for that would not be the way of his famiglia, or “family.”

His attempts to do just this, however, provide the hilarious opening to Over the River and through the Woods. This is a play about family, traditions, love, and the struggle that Nick makes to both love his family and yet live as an individual. His attempts to make American choices and remain a part of an Italian family provide the tensions that drive this funny and touching play. Can Nick make this career decision without being meddled, advised, wed, and fed to death?

Overrun since prehistory by the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Normans, Spaniards, various types of Goths, and today by tourists, the Italians kept things together through the strength of the family. United against outsiders, la famiglia nurtured, protected, and provided. The individual was measured by their role in the family, and to live without, or apart from one’s family was not often possible.

To maintain a family was the proudest and most challenging task for the Italian male. “Tengo famiglia,” literally, “I hold a family,” is a statement of pride and responsibility, a mantra of duty. But Nick, the second generation born in America, doesn’t see it that way. His parents have abandoned the field and fled to retirement in Florida, leaving Nick to be the good grandson, having dinner with his grandparents every Sunday, and putting up with their idiosyncrasies and the behaviors that drive him to distration.

So, Nick is going to take a job and move out of town, but not without la famiglia trying to hold him, and themselves, together. His grandmother arranges that a single girl, Caitlin, come to dinner, and perhaps if a match is made, Nick will abandon this crazy idea of leaving the family.

The character of Caitlin is Nick’s mirror. She finds his family’s behavior charming and entertaining, and she finds Nick’s intolerance of them, well, intolerable. With this new perspective Nick sees his family as people, no longer as a unified force of food and quirky behavior meant to obstruct his will to be an individual. And la famiglia, they also come to see Nick as a man, not frozen in time as “the grandson,” but as a man who “tiene famiglia,” who has a family, who is a man, and who has a reason to be alive.