Photo Flash: SIX PASSIONATE WOMEN Begins Tonight at TNC

Nino, an Italian film maker with a strong resemblance to Federico Fellini, is in an artistic crisis. Every new work is, for him, an artistic crisis. So he goes to bed with a multitude of women, seeking ideas and stimulation, feeding on them both humanly and artistically. Nino is sexually impotent until he gets a good idea, and then he's hellfire. But his sexual partners, all artists in their own right, are not satisfied. Rallied by a wealthy feminist American widow, they decide that to be a muse is to be exploited. So they exact revenge by making a movie of Nino's life and fantasies, Candid Camera-Style. Thus unfolds "Six Passionate Women" by Mario Fratti, a play inspired by the playwright's personal acquaintance with Fellini, whom he covered closely as a journalist in the late 1950s. It combines a serious disquisition on the creative mind with recurring themes of Fratti's plays: betrayal, jealousy and sexual politics. Theater for the New City will present the piece today, October 9 to 26, directed by Stephan Morrow. Dennis Parlato, as the film maker, heads a cast of eight that is peppered with Broadway vets. BroadwayWorld has a first look at the cast below!

Fratti says the play is all Fellini but admits there's a measure of autobiography "with every playwright." Between 1957 and 1959, working as an Italian journalist, he covered Fellini's rehearsals and observed his relationships with actors, including the palpable measure of hostility and resentment there. From this came the idea of a revenge play, in which a group of women would rise up against a Fellini figure and his co-writer who, like the women is deserving of revenge but unable to exact it. (In Fratti's plays, the women most often prevail in the battle of the sexes.) Fratti later wrote one other play on Fellini--an adaptation of the film "8½"--that evolved into the Broadway musical, "Nine," a winner of five Tony awards and eight Drama Desk awards.

Fratti subtitled the "Six Passionate Women" as "a comedy about creativity and stealing." The word "passionate," he notes, derives from the Latin verb patire, which means to suffer. The point is strongly made that creation is always a group effort, that creativity and sexual potency are closely linked in the creative process and that Fellini's genius was completely dependent upon preying on the women around him. Voyeurism is often a phase of the creative process, but it becomes problematic when the person playing the part of the muse asserts himself or herself as creator. In this production, the women rise up against this type of creative misappropriation. They reverse the role of voyeur by filming Nino as they slyly interrogate him on his creative process and what it means to be temporarily impotent. As they explore his secrets and deep fantasies they become the creative force by secretly filming him. By the end of the play, the women have conquered the hapless males and celebrate their victory with a toast to feminism.

Dennis Parlato heads the cast as Nino. He has appeared on Broadway in "A Chorus Line," "Chess," "Sound of Music" and "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels." He was in the national tours of "The Graduate" and "Annie" and has appeared widely in regional theater. He is also well-known for his long-running roles on TV's "One Life to Live," "The Guiding Light," "Santa Barbara" and "Loving."

The passionate women are played by Donna Vivino (Broadway's "Les Miserables," national tours of "Wicked" and "Hairspray"), Ellen Barber (Broadway's "Fame" and films "Nine 1/2 Weeks," "Apology" and "Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues"), Colleen Sexton (Broadway's "Jekyll and Hyde," national tours of "Legally Blonde," "Wicked" and "Chicago"), Line Rettmer, Carlotta Brentan and Giulia Bisinella. The co-writer is played by Kevin Sebastian.

Set design is by Mark Marcante. Lighting design is by Alexander Bartenieff. Costume design is by Susan Hemley.

Photo Credit: Jonathan Slaff