.22 Caliber Mouth

The Characters: Deanne Campino

Deanne is a woman in her mid forties who has struggled for years with profound emotional ups and downs. Nervous breakdowns have, at times, caused her to be institutionalized. She has never lost her way so much that she could not return to society.

Keeping apartments, holding down some upscale jobs; her last, at a police pathology lab reading slides.

Though diagnosed as bi-polar and depressed, her basic innate soundness, extraordinary intelligence and a small flame of willingness to love that will not burn out, is what has managed to keep her surviving.

Attractive, funny, and sarcastic, we find her in a fugue state between the darkness of the past and the light that a new flirtation unexpectedly brings.

She lives in a crummy apartment in the lower east side, surviving on food stamps, medications and other assistance programs like SSI…or as they called it in the 70’s nut pay.
She grew up in the out skirts of Boston.

Photo: Deanne as played by Lauren Robert

The Characters: Colin Maitlin

Handsome, charming barfly, Colin Maitland’s true history remains elusive till the play’s end. Deanne never quite understands where he has come from, but he is impossible to resist. His is a unique combination of sophisticated repartee’ and blue-collar animus.

His language is often peppered with large words that he uses with ease, yet when without warning, a tsunami of blinding rage swirls into any moment, any remnant of sophistication is lost. In it’s place, is Colin’s seething blinding anguish and fury.

Colin’s soul-searching is compelling, his rawness is his realness. He can be strong and weak, tender or mean, very hot and very cold. Something, old and cruel, revealed to us as the story unfolds drives him hard frustrating his attempts to clean up his life …and his choices.

Photo: Colin Maitlin as played by Timothy Warmen

The Characters: Ronnie Campino

What did Ronnie see? What did she know growing up in the Campino house? Five years older than sister, Deanne, Ronnie goes to great lengths to keep her demons locked deep inside her. She is insular, shy, and socially awkward.

The small singular back room of an accountants office in Dalton’s Furniture Store is the job she lives on, oppressed and abused by her boss, but comforted by the agitation of a familiar scenario. Yet, Deanne’s emotional frailty, gives her a sense of one-up, and driven by a confused fantasy of familial “love”, and perhaps guilt, she has tried and failed many times to connect with her sister.

Ronnie Campino as played by Laura Jordan.

The Characters: Frankie Canton

If you can smoke it, shoot it, snort it, inhale it, swig it, swallow it…not swallow it…Frankie’s your man. A scientific marvel in that he still does at times make sense. His wily heart still beats. And it thumps with much more than just the anxiety of the next fix .He loves his friends. His Deanne especially. Though one must love Frankie back with great indulgence to get to the good stuff.. Since forging a friendship with Deanne in Wrentham State Drug Rehab “ I was the monkey in the next cage”… he has remained as devoted a friend as a homeless, dispirited, speed freak can be. He is her confident, her watch-dog. She suffers his twisted drug-addled style of speaking because he can make her laugh. She’ll struggle to de-code his inverted sentences and nihilist rants.

Because his spirit is a good one… a dear one, becoming as lost as Frankie is not that hard. 

Photo: Frankie Canton as played by Ted Brunetti

The Characters: Carmel

‘Luscious Lady” who could drop you with a bat of her over-shadowed eyes, powerful black man who’s single punch could knock you back to your mama’s womb. Carmel is the street. She is sexy, flashy, naughty trashy on the outside. Inside she is noble. She is Royalty. Though trouble has kicked her ass over and over, she believes in love, in triumph over adversity, in her return to fame, in the good times, the good life and the good of others.

SHE KNOWS “Fool, it’s just a phone call away, you heah what I’m tellin’ y’all?

A tall, beautiful trannny who has been working from the same Central Park bench off and on for years, there have been special times of more glamorous work in her life. She met, pal, Frankie Canton, when she was the costume seamstress and caretaker for prizefighter Joe Frazier, and his traveling musical road show, The Joe Frazier Las Vegas Review. Hard to shake the hard times for good, this play finds her on the bench again, thrilled and hopeful about a new “Thursday night Sweetie”, struttin’ her education to Frankie, as only Carmel can all about the real basics of Bein’ Somebody.

Photo: Carmel as played by Paul Oakley Stovall