Saturday, Sunday, Monday

Saturday, Sunday, Monday runs across three days of one family's weekend, and the ragu is on the stove from the first scene. Rosa starts it on Saturday. On Sunday everyone eats it. By Monday the household has taken itself apart over a remark made at the table.

Don Peppino has begun to suspect his wife of an interest in the lodger upstairs, and says nothing about it until the whole extended family is seated, at which point he says all of it. Aunts, in-laws, a doctor, a son with opinions and a daughter with a secret are present for the collapse. What starts as a jealous husband refusing his food becomes, by the end of the meal, a full accounting of everything the family has agreed for years not to mention.

Eduardo De Filippo wrote the comedy in 1959, and it is the clearest example of his method: an ordinary domestic occasion, observed almost in real time, in which the small business of cooking and serving carries the emotional weight while the dialogue circles the thing nobody will name.

The middle act is the set piece. It is a meal, played as a meal, with the timing of a farce and the manners of a documentary, and the comedy comes from watching people eat through an argument because leaving the table would be worse.

By Monday morning the house is quiet and something has shifted. De Filippo does not resolve the marriage so much as let it survive, which is the more honest ending and the harder one to play.