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Clockwise from top, Teddy Coluca, Paul Whelihan, Andrea Prendamano, Elizabeth Nicholas, Joey Nasta and Veronica Shea co-star in “Over the River and Through the Woods.”
Nick Cristano has an unusually intense relationship with his grandparents. All four of them.
It’s the 1980s, and 29-year-old Nick — the central character of Joe DiPietro’s 1998 family comedy, “Over the River and Through the Woods,” which will end its brief run at The Hackensack Performing Arts Center on March 14 and 15 — lives in New York, where he works in marketing. But every Sunday, without fail, he takes the bus to Hoboken to have dinner with his two pairs of working class Italian-American grandparents, who live close to each other. His parents have moved to Florida, his sister is in San Diego, and his father’s brother died years ago, in The Korean War, so he is the only non-grandparent there, on most Sundays.
And the grandparents are … quite a crew. They are loud and eccentric, and proudly old-fashioned. They’re loving, but also overbearing.
When Nick (played by Joey Nasta) tells his mother’s mother Aida (Elizabeth Nicholas), who is always pushing food on everybody, that he is not hungry, she responds, “You’re breaking my heart.”
His other grandmother, Emma (Andrea Prendamano), has another fixation. “Before I’m dead, I want to see Nicky married,” she declares.
CHRISTINE EDER
From left, Joey Nasta, Teddy Coluca and Paul Whelihan in “Over the River and Through the Woods.”
Aida is married to Frank (Teddy Coluca, who some might recognize as Lester the Doorman in the Hulu series, “Only Murders in the Building”). Frank really shouldn’t be driving anymore, but he insists, so Nick fights with him about that.
Emma is married to Nunzio (Paul Whelihan), who has a major health issue that he hasn’t spoken about to anyone else in the family. Like the rest of the grandparents, he has strong opinions, including his belief that eating Chinese food is “like eating cancer.”
“How did I come from these people?” Nick asks. “My parents, I can understand. But these people!”
The Company Theatre Group, which has been on hiatus since 2019, returns to presenting plays with this production, which is directed by its founder and managing artistic director, Lou Scarpati. It is consistently funny, with the cast showing uniformly great comic timing. And despite emphasizing broad humor early on, it ends up being quite touching, too.
Early in the play, Nick stops in to see his grandparents on a Thursday — not a Sunday — because he has some big news to share. He mentions that he is undergoing psychotherapy, and his grandparents are horrified, but that’s not the big news. He tells them that he has received a major, potentially life-changing promotion, but that to take it, he would have to move to Seattle.
And all hell breaks loose.
Well, that’s exaggerating it a bit. But the grandparents are crushed to learn that he may be moving away. He is, in many ways, the center of their lives.
CHRISTINE EDER
Andrea Prendamano and Paul Whelihan in “Over the River and Through the Woods.”
But then Emma comes up with a plan. Nick is single and unattached. But if he had a significant other, maybe he wouldn’t be so eager to move away. And so on the next Sunday, when Emma knows Nick will be there, she invites Kaitlin (Veronica Shea), the nice, single niece of her canasta partner, to dinner. (Kaitlin is Irish, not Italian, but desperate times call for desperate measures.)
“I expected them to be laying on the guilt, somethin’ fierce,” Nick tells the audience directly. “But they didn’t. They did something worse.”
(Throughout the play, in fact, DiPietro has the characters deliver fourth wall-breaking monologues, sharing their thoughts or filling in some perspective-adding history. As when Nunzio proudly talks about the old days: I was the first in my family to get a good job with a union at a Ford automobile factory. And the way I got the job, see, was I told them I was Irish. I had to, ’cause those days, the most famous Italians in America were the Pope, and Sacco and Vanzetti. And did they look at us and think Pope? Oh no! Sacco and Vanzetti!)
Back at the Sunday dinner … Emma had told neither Nick nor Kaitlin that she was setting them up. And so Nick, when he figures it out (in seconds), is mortified, and gets all sullen and sarcastic for the rest of the evening.
CHRISTINE EDER
Elizabeth Nicholas and Joey Nasta in “Over the River and Through the Woods.”
The thing is, though, that he actually likes Kaitlin, and once they’re away from the elders, he asks if she would like to go on a real date. And she says no. She found his grandparents endearing, despite their quirks, and couldn’t understand how Nick could be so rude to them.
The play’s second act is spent answering the questions brought up in Act 1. Will Nick take the job in Seattle? Do he and Kaitlin have any kind of future together? Will his grandparents ever learn to let go?
I won’t spoil the surprises, but I will say that DiPietro finds a way to resolve everything that is positive in tone, but not overly sentimental or unrealistic.
The Company Theatre Group will present “Over the River and Through the Woods” at The Hackensack Performing Arts Center, March 14 at 2 and 7 p.m. and March 15 at 2 p.m. Visit hacpac.org.
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