You know how cartoon Italian immigrants speak, with those A’s at the ends of their words. And how they communicate, especially onstage and in film, with shouts. Unless they’re delivering badda-bings: “You make wine from scratch?”

Skip to next paragraph

Multimedia

Audio Slide Show: Heartbreak House

Readers’ Opinions

Forum: Theater

“No, from grape.”

So it is no small compliment to say that despite these drawbacks, the actor Dan Lauria manages to inject real, if sporadic, emotion into “A Stone Carver,” the somewhat predictable tale of a homeowner who barricades himself inside the house he built so it won’t be bulldozed for a highway exit. And though the play, which opened on Thursday at the SoHo Playhouse, is set in the fuzzy terrain between television sitcom and true drama, Mr. Lauria does receive some help from the author, William Mastrosimone, who based the script on his father’s experience in New Jersey in the 1960’s.

Originally written in the early 70’s, when it was titled “The Understanding,” the play has had several incarnations before its most recent version, in June by the Passage Theater Company in Trenton. Directed by Robert Kalfin, the production has transferred to the SoHo Playhouse, with the author listed as one of the producers. Mr. Mastrosimone, who wrote the 1983 play “Extremities” and was the head writer of the TNT mini-series “Into the West,” knows how to tell a good story, though here he relies too much on clichés.

Pigheaded Old World fathers usually have estranged New World sons, and Mr. Lauria’s Agostino is no exception. Raff (Jim Iorio) left home as soon as he could, meeting his mother at church, a place his father never went unless he was carving angels for the facade. When the play opens, Agostino is finishing a statue and listening to the bulldozers outside as he talks to his deceased wife, whose spirit, he believes, is still in the house. (The evocatively designed kitchen and garden are by Nathan Heverin.) Suddenly Raff, an aspiring politician who wants to run for mayor, arrives with his WASP fiancée, Janice (Elizabeth Rossa), to persuade the old man to leave.

Suspicious of his son’s motives and put off by Janice’s initial cool politeness, Agostino alternately insults and entices them, as the homemade wine and advice flow. To Janice: “Wha love? You learn to love. You no start with love. You end with love.” Of course she and Agostino will bond, but her insistence that he free the blackbirds he has trapped for food and her goading of Agostino and Raff to box so they can punch each other silly like old times seem inconsistent.

Ms. Rossa’s Janice is a necessary connection between the two men but not interesting enough in her own right. Mr. Iorio is good as he veers between stoic and hothead in the difficult role of Raff, a character, like Janice, who could benefit from more development. With a cheerful vulgarity reminiscent of Chico Marx, Mr. Lauria, familiar from the television series “The Wonder Years,” chews the scenery as if it were calamari and wins the hearts, if not the minds, of his listeners.

Mr. Mastrosimone’s play is timely, given the Supreme Court ruling last year that government can use the power of eminent domain to clear space for private development. That his father’s property was razed for a highway ultimately built elsewhere is the all-too-real-life ending of the offstage story. Agostino would understand. Is there a difference, he asks, between what he escaped — extortion by the Mafia in Sicily — and what he found, a government that can demolish an entire functioning neighborhood?