“Moonstruck,” John Patrick Shanley’s movie comedy about a fiery Italian American romance, won him (and Cher) an Oscar in 1988, the same year that Shanley’s play “Italian-American Reconciliation” made its Off-Broadway debut; “a small-scale gloss on the smash film,” one critic wrote. 

The play is again in the shadow of “Moonstruck,” given yesterday’s announcement of a first-ever, starry staged reading of the film’s script on Broadway next month. Real-life couple Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale will portray the Cher and Nicholas Cage characters from “Moonstruck” in a one-night benefit reading November 10 at the Music Box Theater, two weeks after the close of the revival of “Italian-American Reconciliation” on a cramped stage Off-Off Broadway in the basement theater at The Flea.

Much like the better-known “Moonstruck,”  the production of “Italian-American Reconciliation,” directed by Austin Pendleton, offers real pleasure, if not lots of reliable real-life insights about affairs of the heart, with a fine five-member cast including the always-fabulous Mary Testa portraying comically operatic characters who feel love and pain deeply, often confuse the two emotions, and need to talk about it loudly and at great length.

Huey and Janice divorced three years ago, after she shot his dog. But Huey now tells his best friend Aldo that he needs Janice back. Aldo points out, reasonably, that Huey now has a new girlfriend, Teresa, who is pleasant and non-homicidal, and he should stick with her. But Huey says he has to break up with Teresa. “I’m like Samson, and Janice is the woman who cut my hair and broke my strength.  I want my strength of being a man back, and I’ve got to go to Janice for that.” He asks Aldo to help him, by meeting with Janice first, in order to soften her up before Huey then beseeches her.

Meanwhile, Teresa is telling her friend Aunt May that she needs to break up with Huey; she can’t take his obsessing over his past anymore. 

That’s the set-up for two long scenes that pay off in comic complications. The first is when Huey and Teresa meet; Teresa is about to break up with him, when Huey breaks up with Teresa first – which causes Teresa to urge him to change his mind.

The second is when Aldo decides that the best thing he can do for his friend is to try to woo Janice himself, which he does in a balcony scene that obviously mimics the one in “Romeo and Juliet” — albeit with very different results.

The play, which is subtitled “A Folktale,” ends more realistically than the romantics in the audience might have hoped and expected. But along the way, in set designed with the sort of decorations that festoon Little Italy during the annual Feast of San Genera, there are both humorous exchanges and what sounds like some wisdom about love, especially from Mary Testa’s Aunt May: “Anybody you really want is expensive is some way. There ain’t no bargains in people. You get what you pay for and the currency is trouble.” But even May knows she’s no oracle: “I do wonder why I’ve been through the things I’ve been through — if all this stuff is wisdom or just lint.”

Italian-American Reconciliation
The Flea through October 26
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $52.50
Written by John Patrick Shanley
Directed by Austin Pendleton
Set by Scott Aronow, lighting by Annie Garrett-Larsen, costumes by Ariel Pellman 
Cast: Robert Farrior as Aldo, Wade McCollum as Huey, Mia Gentile as Teresa, Mary Testa as Aunt May, Linda Manning as Janice.