Interview: Ronnie Marmo & Chiara Montalto, A Brooklyn Love Story

Ronnie Marmo is on stage channeling Lenny Bruce while he tests the mic for an upcoming variety show fundraiser. The set from the previous night’s performance of A Brooklyn Love Story is nowhere to be seen, except for a random furnace peaking out from behind a wall. He spots me from afar and affably invites me to sit in the house to soak in the air-conditioning, not enjoyed by the rest of the theatre building. I come bearing a message for him to meet a gentleman named Francisco I met in the secret parking lot on the roof. A performer named Julia serenades her fellow talent with an Amy Winehouse song while channeling Lily Allen and playing the mandolin. Then, two other singers Chad Addison and Dave Cancel perform an original song called “Waited So Long” about lost love, with Addison on guitar. After speaking with Francisco, Ronnie walks over and excitedly tells me about possibly blowing out a wall and tentative plans to create a blackbox within the theatre. He’s not sure if he wants to make that choice, but likes considering a series of options and always being busy. “It’s great, but constant. Every hour is booked up.”

Outside of the main-stage, he introduces me to Chiara Montalto (first name is pronounced Key-ah-rah really quickly, lightly rolling the ‘r’), which means clarity or light. While the name is beautiful and unique, she tells me it’s pretty standard in Italy (she’s third-generation American). She’s pretty salt-of-earth: what you see is what you get. Marmo’s directing Chiara in her one-woman show A Brooklyn Love Story (formerly titled Emergency Used Candles). They have much in common. Both of them proud of their Italian-Americans identities, they have roots in both Brooklyn (Prospect Park for Marmo) and New Jersey. For their ancestors, those were basically the two choices opted by for immigrants. Marmo observed, “You either stopped in Staten Island and settled in Brooklyn, or you kept going over the outer bridge and ended up in New Jersey.” He muses over the transformation of his old neighborhood. As it was once a place where families tried to escape, it’s now beautified with enviable real estate value.

Chiara Montalto in
A Brooklyn Love Story

Chiara saw the literary potential in life with her grandfather and began documenting her observations. She wrote the play after being prodded by close friend and associate Theresa Gambacorta, who took note of the rich mine of material. As it came together, she was inspired by “the dichotomy of this clueless young girl and old guy.” “I wanted to evoke a time and place … It’s special to me.” She grew up listening to Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, 1950s New York doo-wop. “I really love that stuff. It has informed me,” along with more contemporary influences like early rock, punk, and alternative music. They successfully submitted the play to the Emerging Artists (TADA) festival and held a reading at the Kraine Theatre in New York. Since its inception, it has been in a constant state of evolution. With every new stage, “the lens get a little bit clearer and sharper. It has been changing a lot.”

After New York, she wasn’t sure how to go forward. Enter Marmo as a mentor. They first met at the Garden State Film Festival. Marmo read the play less than two years ago, liked it, and knew it had good reviews; it could also feed his agenda to produce plays where audiences go home with something. "There’s nothing worse than a one-person show being a big inside joke in someone’s life and you don’t get it.” There’s also a universality in the themes: the cycle of love and death. “It’s a slice of life,” shares Marmo. In rehearsal, he called scenes, ‘moments in time.’ The grandfather isn’t a character, but a ‘person.’ “We just wanted to tell the truth. I’m a simple guy. My life is complicated, so I want to watch things that are nice and simple. That’s why I’m attracted to these kinds of stories. My wife was balling her eyes out and she’s a tough critic. I got a few directing notes later that night,” he jokes, “but she loved it.”

Ronnie Marmo

Marmo shared that the theatre recently lost a company member a couple of weeks ago. He was only sixty years old. “Watching his girlfriend going through this whirlwind, selling and giving away his stuff,” helping tell Chiara’s story just became more imperative and carried with it an enhanced poignancy. “That was my intention when I wrote it,” Chiara says. “My grandfather was important to me, but, in the grand scheme of things, we were no different from the next set of people. Everybody grieves. It’s universal. And everybody loves. That’s universal. My hope for the world is that everyone has someone in their life who represents what my grandfather represented to me. That kind of love.”

Initially, Marmo and Chiara talked cross-country on the phone and via Skype, before she spent an entire week in L.A. working on the text with him. But, when it actually came time to producing the play, they had a mere five days to get it up on its feet. She got into town about a week ago.  Marmo is a self-described perfectionist who prefers a long rehearsal process. But, without that luxury came an uncertainty that kept him on his toes. He’s quite proud of the end result, which they continue to refine. Chiara: “You take as much direction as you can, and just throw it all the way, rely on instincts, and hope for the best.”

Brooklyn being a new show, he hopes audiences will see it with fresh eyes. Marmo and I make a joke about how often Danny and the Deep Blue Sea gets produced in Los Angeles.  The city gets a bad rep for theatre and it’s really third fiddle in this town. He changed the title to attract recycled New Yorkers, but they both felt like it fit. It really was a love story, just not the one people may expect when they hear “love story” in the title. Marmo enjoys the misleading aspect. “I like when I go to a movie and get something I didn’t expect.” He mentions his stint playing Lenny Bruce in a one-man show. He didn’t have the rights to do his material, so was forced to create his own version. One critic smashed him to pieces. It’s water under the bridge, but, at the time, he called him up and told him, “‘I wish you saw the play we were presenting, rather than the play you wanted it to be.’”

Ronnie Marmo as Lennie Bruce

One of Marmo’s associates walks through to relay a bit of info. Without missing a beat, the sassy director tries to play matchmaker. She laughs him off and shuffles on. Then, unexpectedly and randomly, an unidentified woman asks from down the hallway around the corner, “Is somebody here?” The stage manager George gets up and tells her that there wasn’t; she believes him and leaves.

I bring up the set, which includes this massive net plastered with legal pad pages. The image is striking: it looks like a papier-mâché spiral with an armchair at its base, evoking a literary tornado. Chiara shares, “I walked in and it took my breath away. I had tears in my eyes. It was the set I dreamed about.” Marmo approach was “it’s the night before the funeral and you’ve been asked to say something.” There are other pieces that signify reaching in from the past like a jukebox, a bar sign, and some lamps. “The play’s not abstract, which is why I wanted to play against it. I liked the idea of things coming to life.” He admits that he wishes he could imbue his shows with more production value, but to keep a theatre afloat, he has to be keep cranking out the shows.

His director for Theatre 68’s upcoming musical Standing the Line pops in. When he shares that it’s about a suicide prevention hotline, I mention the recent productions of The Late Harry Moss and Our Lady of 121st Street. “I’m like a mental case with death,” the coincidence in themes hit him all at once. “Growing up, I thought I’d be the one who would beat dying. Then, Sinatra died. If anyone could beat death, it would have been him. When he passed, I actually looked at my brother and went, ‘We’re screwed.’” He’s very excited about the world premiere of And Where You Are Going written by Sam Henry Kass (Seinfeld). It’s a dark and funny play and when I ask him what it’s about, he slaps his forehead and responds, “Oh my, I think I must be only accepting death scripts.”

Chiaro Montalto in A Brooklyn Love Story

Crystal Craft who has directed Bent, Boys Next Door, and even a production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea shows up and Marmo leaves for a meeting. I spend some one-on-one time with Chiara. She has been enjoying the Los Angeles weather. As well, working with Ronnie has been a dream come true. “He’s brilliant … he found layers in my own work that I did not know were there.”

We discuss her entire family, who she describes as being so tight, her four grandparents socialized with each other. She has countless memories of her grandfather, which didn’t make it into her show. They lived with each other for ten years. He was full of energy and wasn’t above drinking wine and bowling with a mini home-set in their apartment with friends even until the break of dawn on New Year’s Day. “He was always open like that.” Part of his vigor would lead to mishaps like falling on the ice at 6 AM while trying to move furniture. “In the moment, it was stressful.” But, in retrospect, it was funny in a nostalgic way for Chiara. She was late to getting a cell phone, so she relied on him to take messages on their landline. With so many acquaintances named Anthony, he’d have to distinguish them by their last names. When he died, his wake and funeral was full of those Anthony’s and a ton more of her friends. He was loved. Even though he wanted to make age 100 more than anything, he died at 96. During a routine pacemaker change, the doctors diagnosed him with an advanced and sudden stage of leukemia. It was swift and brutal, and he was gone. She reminisced about how they’d sometimes spend Saturdays driving through their neighborhood. She’d point out possible dating material, but, having had one great love in his life, he’d never be interested.

Chiara Montalto

And Chiara was close to her grandmother, whom she describes as lovely. She got her name from her and has her black hair as well. Her elder dyed hers when she started going grey. After Chiara’s grew in as a child, her grandmother stopped coloring hers when she saw she had the same dark locks. Like any young woman, Chiara dealt with body image issues. When she worried about not being thin enough, her grandmother reassured her that, “A man likes a woman with a little meat on her bones.” Little details like these shaped Chiara’s perspective on the world and develop a healthy self-esteem.

Her grandmother had a nice life with her grandfather (“she married a prince”), but was never afforded the opportunity to have an education. She was a talented seamstress who had gotten into a prestigious fashion school. But, at that time, an educated woman was viewed as less marriageable, for lack of a better term. Opportunities improved for her mother, who grew up in the 50s and 60s. However, the choices were still limited. “You could be a teacher or secretary. She chose the former and she’s amazing.” Chiara is the tail-end of her generation and identifies with everything the women in her family have passed onto her. “I felt I was the first woman in my line who has had the choice in her life to say, ‘this is what I love, what I want to do, and this is how I’m going to go about doing it.’” Everything she has been taught has resonated with her and she feels responsible to represent, considering what she is now allowed to do that wasn’t offered to her predecessors.

Chiara’s grandmother passed while she was a student in Spain. She was the first person she lost with whom she had a huge emotional bond. She found the nearest church and sat for hours before she began to prepare to permanently return to the states to live with her grandfather in his rowhouse. He had two children with her grandmother: her mother and her uncle who grew up to be a priest. Her Catholic faith is integral to her spiritual existence. “I don’t make an apology for that.” She acknowledged that the Catholic Church has taken a huge hit from the behaviors of those who have brought on a series of scandals, but, “I’ve always been able to separate the faith from the institution.” She has a live and let live approach to other’s beliefs and is open to whatever any religion can do to bring anyone peace. But, “the lens through which I see things is a Catholic,” albeit in a progressive form (i.e. pro-marriage equality, birth control). She finds comfort in the rituals, but loves “walking into a church where the priest challenges, rather than berates me.”

Chiara Montalto with her grandfather

Chiara is grateful to have the experience she has had with Theatre 68 and Marmo. She’s not certain what the future holds, but it’s clear that she is taking full advantage of the life she has been given and giving life to the world around her. You can catch a glimpse of her contributions as Montalto finishes up the last few weeks of her show at Theatre 68. A Brooklyn Love Story closes October 6th.