Playing the cards you’re dealt

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This article was published 27/04/2023 (1234 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s an actor’s job, however briefly, to become a different person.

During a game of scopa, a highly competitive Italian card game, Elio Zarrillo becomes a potty-mouthed, trash-talking machine running on overdrive.

“I’ll be playing with my partner, the love of my life, and she’s calling me an (unprintable word) and I’m calling her a dirty (unprintable word),” laughs Zarrillo, a local performer and the playwright of the family comedy-drama Volare, making its world première today at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

For Zarrillo, the 40-card game, composed of four suits — coins, swords, clubs and cups — is more than just a competition. “It represents tension, and joy, and it’s a place where people can say the gnarliest things they wouldn’t say elsewhere, but everyone knows it’s all in good fun,” says Zarrillo (who uses they/them pronouns), shuffling the deck with experienced hands and sipping Italian coffee.

Zarrillo learned to play the game the hard way, from siblings, cousins, and grandparents who were sticklers for the rules and didn’t give up easily. As the players collect their cards, they build individual stockpiles of assets at the expense of their opponents, looking for any edge they can find in their ultimate pursuit of a scopa, or sweep, of the cards on the table. The winner takes all.

The game, like any high-contact sport, is a metaphor for familial life itself: a battle of wits, a game of inches and a hereditary, multi-generational tug of war.

In Volare, Zarrillo’s first full-length, solo-authored show, the game is played by siblings Dominic and Grace, who head to Transcona to visit their Nonno’s second wife, Madeleine, with a key asset on the line: the deed to Nonno’s house.

It’s a set-up that might send shivers down the spine of anybody familiar with the messiness of estate law, scopa, or both.

But this is a show, not real life, and in Zarrillo’s eyes, the misery of family drama and the levity of family comedy go hand in hand.

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In the local theatre world, Zarrillo is in the midst of a run so busy they made the decision last year to quit their full-time job as a middle school teacher.

Zarrillo is set to appear in the upcoming Shakespeare in the Ruins production of Twelfth Night. They also will follow up Volare with a local production at PTE of The Outside Inn, a play they co-created with local performer and writer Sharon Bajer.

Readers might recall Zarrillo’s name from this year’s Winnipeg Jewish Theatre production of Daniel Thau-Eleff’s Narrow Bridge, a world première that earned a five-star review this February in the Free Press. As the lead character Sholem, a secular Jew who undergoes two simultaneous transitions — in terms of gender and orthodoxy — Zarrillo performed with humour and soul. It was a powerful performance that drew on the pain of exclusion and the euphoria of finding one’s place.

The busyness was welcomed by Zarrillo, a trans artist who a few years ago worried whether there was any space for their success and acceptance in the theatre world.

“When I finished my undergrad (at the University of Winnipeg, in 2015), I was really committed and dedicated to pursuing work as a professional theatre artist, but I was consistently met with a devastating lack of trans and queer representation (on stages) across the country, especially here in Winnipeg,” they say.

In 2018, Zarrillo hit a point of frustration.

“At that time, there was a lot of new artistic leadership in the theatre community in Winnipeg, so I sat down with essentially all of the artistic directors in town to inquire, ‘What can we do about this?’”

The resounding response was a positive one, Zarrillo says, especially from PTE’s Thomas Morgan Jones. The brass was open to suggestions of plays which had already been written. But another suggestion came as a welcome one to Zarrillo: “What if you wrote a play yourself?”

“I’d never sat behind a computer independently and done the ticky-tacky-ticky-tacky thing and written a play (alone),” says Zarrillo, whose first exposure to theatre came as a participant of the Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s Young Company. “I’d always developed new work in collaboration.”

Zarrillo applied and was accepted to PTE’s and the Manitoba Association of Playwrights’ early career playwriting units, where Volare was first conceptualized. Later, Zarrillo joined the first National Queer and Trans Playwriting Unit, spearheaded by Vancouver’s Zee Zee Theatre.

The goal of that unit, Zee Zee says, is to address what the company refers to as a “gap that exists in the Canadian theatre ecology,” resulting in five scripts written by queer and trans artists.

“It will result in a canon of new Canadian intersectional plays being developed ready for production,” the company’s site says. Participants are paid $2,000 per month for 10 months while at work on new material.

“It’s a really special thing,” says Zarrillo, who is also working on a script for a show called PEACHES. “There’s something beautiful and palpable that’s tough to articulate — this feeling you get when you’re in a space with folks who have some commonality of experience, a shared vocabulary, and an understanding of where you are.”

All the while, the playwright has been refining Volare with the help of dramaturg Brian Drader and Hazel Venzon, who will be directing Lisa Goebel, Suzanne Kennelly and Heath V. Salazar during the local run.

As Zarrillo gathers up the scopa cards backstage, the faint sounds of an accordion echo from the stage, where the cast is running lines and finding their marks.

It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com