Tony Nardi’s Letters
BRIAN FAWCETT
Last night I saw the first of actor Tony Nardi’s Two Letters,
which is a one-man show currently running in a number of Toronto
venues on successive nights until December 4th.
I went primarily out of a sense of duty. Nardi hangs out at
Dooneys, and I’ve gotten to know him fairly well over
the past several years. I like and respect his intelligence
and enjoy his wit and his quick and quirky sense of humour.
I also think he’s a good actor, not that I know anything
about acting. But I have seen him act in a number of television
movies and short series, and each time out his characterizations
were convincing enough to make me forget that he’s actually
a guy I know.
I always thought, by the way, that actors were self-involved
airheads obsessed with inhabiting other people’s lives
because there was no one home where they were coming from. Last
night convinced me that I’m either wrong about this—or
that Tony Nardi is quite a bit more than an actor. I suspect
it has to be both, because Nardi is, by his own definition,
an actor.
At the moment, Nardi is an angry actor. What made him angry
enough to write the first of the two letters was an offer from
(I think) a television producer to play the role of an Italian
character in a way that demeaned—and here is where Nardi
gets
interesting—both Italians, actors, and human beings in
general. Nardi turned down the role on principle, which I gather
isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence in this country.
And then he began to stew about it, and what it all means.
The contents of the letter—which is aimed, ostensibly,
at a real-world female casting director named Sarah who couldn’t
fathom why Nardi was so annoyed—will surprise you. Only
a small part of his anger is ethnic. This isn’t to say
Nardi isn’t proudly Italian. He just isn’t the vulgar
stereotype of the ball-scratching, leering patriarchal mafioso.
Neither, he argues, is any other Italian.
What he’s really angry about is that contemporary film
and television in Canada operates by this kind of stereotyping,
and that it, among other things, contributes to making our characterizations
of reality smaller and slower than we know they actually are.
He wants to know why this has happened, and what’s going
to happen to us if we continue to let it happen. These aren’t
rhetorical questions, by the way, and aren’t presented
as such.
The two letters he’s written and is now performing—the
second letter concerns the
conditions of live theatre in Canada—are quite a lot more
than angry rants. Nardi
presents them with an élan that echoes, alternately,
the great Italian playwright and puzzle-maker Luigi Pirandello
and, more oddly, Sam Coleridge sitting on the cliffs of Dover
in 1798 wondering what, exactly, the French Revolution was about
to rain down on the English.
That may sound like heady stuff, and in most ways, it is. But
I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it’s
sententious or boring. Nardi delivers the best kind of tour
de force, one that doesn’t try to overpower its audiences
or monumentalize the subject matter. He’s going to make
you laugh out loud any number of times because, did I mention
this? Nardi is a very, very funny man when he wants to be. And
he tells, as Coleridge once did, “most bitter truth, but
without bitterness.”
