The Man With a 'Tale' That Just Keeps On Going

Chazz Palminteri says about 80 percent of his solo show "A Bronx Tale" -- about growing up in a Mafia-run neighborhood in the early 1960s -- is true.

"The other 20 percent is embellished. . . . I saw the killing exactly the way you saw it in the movie," says Palminteri, referring to his 1993 film, in which he co-starred with its director, Robert De Niro.

But Palminteri -- who'll perform "Bronx Tale" at the Warner Theatre from Tuesday through March 8 -- adds that he never left his parents' apartment with the police, who were hoping that little 9-year-old Cologio, as he's called in the play, would help them identify the gunman.

Most people are familiar with the film, in which Palminteri played the gangster, Sonny, who befriends little Cologio, much to the chagrin of the boy's bus-driver dad (De Niro). Written when Palminteri was an underemployed stage actor, the play was an off-Broadway hit in 1989.

As he did then, Palminteri plays himself as a 9-year-old and a teen, along with the other characters.

Last year, the actor took a break from his steady film career (including the upcoming "Hollywood and Wine") to revive the play on Broadway.

In the play, Palminteri shows how he became fascinated as a boy by the local mobsters and their ways. He hung out at their bar. "I would get them coffee and cake and throw the dice for them and cut the lemons and the limes," he says.

Sonny, the top gangster, had a particular hold on the boy. "He read Machiavelli and he was a pretty interesting guy. I would put him on one side and my father on the other."

That moral tug-of-war is the heart of Palminteri's account of growing up at the corner of 187th and Belmont Avenue. "My father used to say it doesn't take much strength to pull a trigger," says the actor, but "to get up every morning and work" took a will his father wanted the boy to appreciate. He says his play "is a tribute to the working people."

He has long been struck by how the film affects people. "I've done 60 movies and this movie is just like this incredible thing. I don't understand it myself. People say: 'Oh my God, my son saw "Bronx Tale." It changed his life,' " Palminteri says.

The actor seems to feel a need to bring the story directly to audiences. After all, he says, "I am the guy that it happened to." When young people come backstage, Palminteri says he gives them a bit of his father's wisdom they heard in the play. "I give them a card and it says: 'The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.' . . . It really makes an impression."

"I just love it. I can't explain it," Palminteri says. "It's like a mission that I have to do."

Bananas and Memories

Brian Hemmingsen and David Bryan Jackson say their lives in the theater were partly fated by seeing "Krapp's Last Tape" when they were young. Now Hemmingsen is playing the recluse in the Samuel Beckett work, for Keegan Theatre's New Island Project, and Jackson is directing him. The production runs tomorrow through March 14 at Arlington's Theatre on the Run.

"This is one of the first plays, when I was a young actor of about 19, that I wanted to do," Hemmingsen says. "And of course at 19, it was, what am I? An idiot? You have to wait a few years to do this play."

For the British-bred Jackson, the epiphany came at 15, after seeing it in London. He says he saw "what theater can achieve, just through one person onstage. It was quite a profound moment for me and I think it stayed with me all my life."

The iconic solo piece, which lasts about an hour, begins wordlessly for many minutes as Krapp goes through a comic ritual about the eating of a banana -- a binding fruit that he craves despite his dodgy digestion. Possibly an unsuccessful writer, as the script hints, the 69-year-old Krapp listens to an audio journal he has made of his life. He focuses on a time 30 years earlier when he broke off a romance to concentrate on his "magnum opus."

"I think it's about regret," Hemmingsen says. "I also think his exclusion of the love is because he's too afraid to be able to give as much as needed. . . . The only close relationship he has is with the tape recorder."

"Although it's not a happy play, it's certainly a play about what really counts in life," Jackson says. "I think he's struggling to remember and to reexperience moments of his life that really mattered." The funny banana bit "misdirects the audience, in a way, from what's about to come. . . . It's an amazing journey that we see in the space of an hour."

Hemmingsen is no stranger to acting Beckett. He has co-starred as Estragon ("Gogo") twice in "Waiting for Godot" for Washington Shakespeare Company and as Hamm in "Endgame" for Scena Theatre, and he's done some of the shorter plays. But he's a sturdily built 6-4, and Krapp is sometimes viewed as an incarnation of the famously lanky author.

"I'd always thought: Oh, he should be a tall, thin guy. He should look like Beckett. . . . I think it's going to be a little bit different because I am so big," Hemmingsen says.

"[Krapp] is a old man. His health isn't good," Jackson notes. When Hemmingsen plays him, "we can see there's a former power and strength to this man, which informs the character."

Both actor and director find Krapp's annual look back at his life via audiotape an intriguing idea. Beckett wrote "Krapp's Last Tape" in the late 1950s, when personal tape recorders were a new toy; he set it in the future, though, so Krapp could credibly have an audio journal of whole his adult life, Jackson posits.

Today we have the tools to document digitally every aspect of our existence and to replay it ad nauseam. Yet, "what would the value of that be?" Jackson says. "Ultimately, you'd probably still find yourself, like Krapp, striving to find that one moment where you could have made a different choice."