For the remainder of the year, my San Jose and Peninsula theater reviews will be posted on Talkin’ Broadway with only introductions to those reviews on this site. Please continue to https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/sanjose/sj303.html for full review.

”Tengo familia” – “I have family.”  To an American, these words are an innocuous truism.  To an Italian, it is a powerful statement of having and belonging, of the unbreakable bonds of blood.  The Italian bromide recurs throughout Joe DiPietro’s beloved play about immigrant generations, Over the River and Through the Woods.  City Lights Theater and Director Jeffrey Bracco present a loving and crowd-pleasing production of this winsome story of societal evolution through one family’s experience.  Laughs are almost continuous with short breaks for sympathetic moments.

Nick, played as often exasperated yet caring grandson by Filip Hofman, is a 30-ish marketing executive from Hoboken, New Jersey who has dinner with both sets of Italian immigrant grandparents every Sunday in the early ‘90s.  His parents have retired to Florida.  When Nick announces that he received an offer for a better position in Seattle, the grandparents conspire to frustrate the move.  And what better way than to have him fall in love with a young lady of their arrangement.  Enter Caitlin, the appealing and ever-smiling Delaney Bantillo, who is the antithesis of what she regards the dyspeptic Nick.

Relationships operate differently in southern than in northern European families.  Nick’s modal means of communication with his grandparents is to shout with seeming hostility, to the point that you wonder if he really loves them.  His frustration comes from incidents like learning that one set of grandparents want to return the VCR he bought them and give him back the money, because it was too expensive a gift.  Or when he finds that the message recorder he bought them is broken and asks why, he finds that maternal Grandpa Frank threw it on the floor because he didn’t like its squawking.

Stereotypes run rampant in the play, but coming from a Sicilian family on my mother’s side with immigrant grandparents, I can testify that I know equivalents of all of the characters in the play and all of the situations and conversations.  Aida (Karen DeHart) is the hostess and maternal grandmother, who seems to only leave the kitchen to take (or give) food orders.  For her, whatever the question, the answer is food, which solves everything.  It’s always “Can I get you something to eat?” and no is not an acceptable answer, which is another of Nick’s frustrations.  So oblivious is Aida to rejection concerning food, when Caitlin says repeatedly that she is vegetarian, Aida blithely replies “I understand. Have a piece of veal.”……………Continue to https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/sanjose/sj303.html

Over the River and Through the Woods runs through December 21, 2025, at City Lights Theater Company, 529 South 2nd Street, San Jose CA. For tickets and information please visit cltc.org.