April 2 – May 8

The Duke on 42nd Street
229 West 42nd Street, 2nd Floor (between 7th & 8th Avenues)

"Startling Originality (Rolling Stone)...Giving and Gifted (Washington Post)... Soulful... Mr. Turturro taps powerfully into the streak of despairing paranoia that lurks beneath the flashy surfaces of the maniacal hustlers and desperate showoffs he plays so flamboyantly.”
(New York Times)

THE PLAY

Penned by Eduardo De Filippo, Italy's leading playwright-director of the last half century, SOULS OF NAPLES (titled Questi Fantasmi! in the original) is a brilliant bittersweet comedy, a perfect showcase for its star, award-winning film and stage actor John Turturro (Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? Barton Fink), who will undertake the leading role of Pasquale, originally played in Italy by De Filippo himself.

Pasquale is a man whose desperate drive to succeed can blind him to anything -- even another man's passion for his wife. When he moves into a supposedly haunted house, the cheap rent and vast number of rooms make it easy for him to delude himself into thinking her visiting lover is only a ghost. But the lover, too, like every character in this romp on the verge of tragedy, is haunted by his past. As ghosts and farcical complications multiply, De Filippo looks deep into the souls of people who suffer and struggle in the crumbling, frenetic world of post-World War II Naples. Using a new translation specially commissioned by Theatre for a New Audience from critic-translator Michael Feingold (Andorra, Threepenny Opera, Happy End), the production will combine puppetry and masks with live actors staged by the eminent puppeteer-director Roman Paska, who collaborated with John Turturro on his acclaimed film Illuminata.

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