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By Jessica Foley
Flash back to 1983: It’s 10-year-old Debi Marcucci’s first trip to Center City’s Walnut Street Theatre, where her cousins have brought her to see a production of “Oliver.”
“I hated it,” she said. “I was bored, it was dark and everyone was singing. I got out of my chair in the mezzanine and sat on the steps.”
Flash forward to 2013: Once again, Marcucci is sitting in the Walnut Street Theatre. This time, though, the Marconi native who now resides at 19th and Porter streets is perched on a metal folding chair that she carried in from her own backstage office.
It’s five hours before the Friday evening curtain on the set of “Good People,” the Tony-nominated play by David Lindsay-Abaire running through Sunday. Marcucci, the production’s assistant director, casts her perceptive big brown eyes quickly over the set: The kitchen of protagonist Margie, a single working mother in Lower Boston.
“Oh my god, are you kiddin’?” Marcucci said. “This is my mother’s kitchen in her rowhome on the 2300 block of South Chadwick — except she has orange, rust-color walls, and she’s got the brown cabinets. Margie is a high school dropout who works at the dollar store, so you got to have mismatched coffee mugs, dollar-store-brand cereal. I’m third-generation Italian, but Abaire’s people are South Boston blue-collar Irish, so you know, you got to have the prayer-mass card on the fridge.”
In other words, the script may say South Boston, but it’s entirely South Philly. Characters like Dottie Gillis — Margie’s 60-year-old landlord, tapping her foot for the rent as she sits at Margie’s kitchen table in rollers and a housecoat — could have been a neighbor up the street.
A born multitasker with a flawless photographic memory, Marcucci is now serving her 15th season as a resident stage manager at the Walnut. An unlikely destiny, perhaps, for the youngster who hated the place so much on her first visit. But then, maybe not. One of her future mentors, Malcolm Black, coincidentally made his directorial debut the same year that the then-10-year-old found “Oliver” so unwatchable. It was Black who, in ’06, first encouraged Marcucci to direct, telling her: “Debi, you know what you’re doing.”
She first started working at the theater in 1994, when longtime stage manager Frank Anzalone took her on as his apprentice. Two years later, she was hired as an equity-card-carrying, mainstage production stage manager. Today, she runs eight shows a week, 49 weeks out of the year, with a skeleton crew of five (plus one apprentice) under her command.
It’s a 180-degree turn from the life she’d once imagined. Her heart had been set on becoming a veterinarian since she was 4, and with that picture firmly in mind, she worked her butt off at St. Maria Goretti High School, 1736 S. 10th St., graduating as salutatorian of her class. But come college application time, New York’s Cornell University rejected her and North Carolina’s Duke University wait-listed her. Frustrated, she attended Penn State University for a year as a biology major — but that summer, back in South Philly with her friends, she realized she was still mad. She started thinking about a different career path entirely.
“I was 17 years old thinking, ‘I can either go into biology and be a veterinarian, or do something I’ve never done in my life — and maybe even meet Madonna,’ she said. “And I said, ‘You know what? Screw it. I’m done being safe. I’m leaping.’ And I went into theater. Boom — that was it.”
That’s the sort of moment she feels resonating in her current project, “Good People.”
“This play — it’s about the paths we choose. Sometimes life’s circumstances force you to make choices,” she said.
In “Good People,” the character of Margie dropped out of her South Boston high school after getting pregnant because, as she states plainly, “I choose to take care of my baby… that’s what people did. I got a job. I got a bunch of jobs in fact, and every one of them sucked because what other job could I get?”
At the start of the play, Stevie, a 20-year-old dollar-store manager, asks Margie, 50, his employee, to sit on a rusty metal fold-out chair in the back alley behind the store. Margie prefers to stand. Stevie fires Margie, quickly rendering her ultimate objective in the play: To pay the rent and keep a roof over her head. Determined to find employment, she tracks down Mickey Dillon — a guy she dated for two months in high school before he escaped South Boston to attend the University of Pennsylvania and eventually become a doctor — and asks him for a job with blunt directness.
It’s a bluntness Marcucci herself shares. One element that the fictional character has in common with the assistant director is their sense of humor.
“That’s how we do it in South Philly,” Marcucci said. “If you can’t laugh at a situation, you will die miserable. And what is the point of living if you are miserable? You got to find humor in everything because it makes you feel better.”
For tickets, visit walnutstreettheatre.org.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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