The Self We Save: Interview with Theresa Carilli, May 2021

Theresa Carilli, PhD, is professor emerita of communication and creative arts at Purdue University Northwest. Her areas of concentration include media studies, performance studies, gender studies, and playwriting. As a coeditor, she has published five anthologies that address media depictions of marginalized groups: Cultural Diversity and the U.S. Media (with Yahya Kamalipour, SUNY, 1998); Women and the Media: Diverse Perspectives (with Jane Campbell, UPA, 2005); Challenging Images of Women in the Media (with Jane Campbell, Lexington Books, 2012); Queer Media Images (with Jane Campbell, Lexington Books, 2013); Locating Queerness in the Media (with Jane Campbell, Lexington Books, 2017). Carilli coedited a special issue of women and the media for the online Global Media Journal with Jane Campbell in 2006. Currently, she is coeditor of the Lexington Book series Media, Culture, and the Arts. As a playwright, Carilli has published two books of plays (Familial Circles, 2000; and Women as Lovers, 1996), and she edited a special theater issue of the journal Voices in Italian Americana (Vols. 9.1–2, Spring & Fall 1998). Her plays have been produced in San Francisco; San Diego; Victoria, British Columbia; Melbourne, Australia; Athens, Greece; and most recently, New York City. In addition to her book Scripting Identity: Writing Cultural Experience (University Press of America, 2008), which features students’ monologues from her courses at Purdue University Northwest, Carilli has published numerous articles and creative scripts. Her latest books include Performative Memoir: The Methodology of a Creative Process (Lexington Books, 2021) and Intersectional Media: Representations of Marginalized Identities, with Jane Campbell (Lexington Books, 2021).What is Italian theater in the US today and how did we get here? Where and how can I find the scripts, immerse myself in the art, and understand this rich piece of America's ethnic history? As I embarked on a project exploring evolution of Italian theater in the US, following its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I encountered the one volume I consider, still, to be the only existing anthology of contemporary Italian American plays. More specifically, the 1998 special issues of Voices in Italian Americana (VIA), conceived and edited by Theresa Carilli, appears to be the sole collection of Italian American plays written in the second half of the twentieth century (between 1970 and 1995) that I could use as a corpus for my work. While Samuel French has published some individual works about Italian subjects or by playwrights of Italian descent in the US, as has Guernica, among others in Canada, it is hard to identify and find existing dramatic scripts. Though other Italian American and Italian Canadian literary anthologies contain one or more dramatic scripts (see Helen Barolini's The Dream Book, for instance, or John Pivato's The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing), there is a dearth of published materials by Italian-identifying playwrights. Why is this? Where are the playwrights of Italian descent? Where are the works of the many artists writing monologues, dramas, comedies, and musicals from the post–World War II period through today? Thanks to the recent and award-winning documentary Tutti in scena! by Laura Capparotti, we can begin to systematically trace and comprehend the long and rich history of this crucial Italian and Italian American art form.1 Yet, many questions remain, for example, about how these artists (playwrights and actors as well as their characters) perceive and express their identities, both personally and professionally. Why have only a few of these Italian American–themed plays (Gemini, Tony and Tina's Wedding, Nine, Mambo Italiano, My Big Gay Italian Wedding) become famous? Have other aspects of their identities become more prominent or central to their artistic impetus and meaning? Or are these playwrights rather reluctant to emphasize any one aspect of themselves—be it female, Italian, queer, working class or other—that may constrain or marginalize them in some way, or worse, exclude them from the white, middle-class norms and not allow them to blend in? Greatly inspired by Carilli's special volume, her plays, short stories, and numerous works on representations of women and queer/LGBTQ+ communities in film and media, I invited her to a conversation about her family, education, gender, and ethnicity, about her sexuality, and about her playwriting, teaching, and healing. 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Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.