Chanella Macri was in her early teens when she picked up her older sister’s copy of Looking For Alibrandi. Despite her own Italian heritage, she couldn’t quite understand why being a third-generation Italian migrant in 1990s Sydney caused 17-year-old Josie Alibrandi – the protagonist of Melina Marchetta’s 1992 novel – so much grief.
“I grew up in a very different world from Josie,” says 25-year-old Macri, who will play the character in a new stage adaptation this July. “By the time I was growing up in primary school, high school, being Italian wasn’t such a negative thing. Being half Samoan, being brown, was much more of an issue for me growing up.”
But that feeling of otherness, and the urge to belong, resonated beyond the references to “tomato day”, rosary beads and slurs such as “wog”. “I grew up in the Blue Mountains, which in the late 90s was very white, a sort of gated community. That desire to be white, to be educated, to be wealthy – to just fit within the mould of what is beautiful and successful – was so strong … I remember how embarrassing it is to be different, to be big, to not look the right way, to have parents that speak differently, a strange accent. There’s such white-hot shame about sticking out.”
Since its publication 30 years ago, the novel and Marchetta’s 2000 film adaptation have become one of Australia’s seminal coming-of-age stories, and a staple of high school English curriculums. Marchetta adapted the book in 1995 for a small Pact theatre production, but since then has turned down proposals to revisit Alibrandi. This production – shared between Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre and Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre – marks the first time in two decades she’s said yes.
“I think I needed distance from both the novel and the film that have very much defined my life,” Marchetta says. Part of what helped director Stephen Nicolazzo win her over was the “very funny and honest and smart” writing of Vidya Rajan, a playwright and comedian who has appeared on SBS’s The Feed and the ABC’s At Home Alone Together. “I was determined to keep my distance, so that Vidya and Stephen could make Alibrandi their own,” she says.
Rajan had a similar reaction as Macri the first time she read the book. “To me Italians were just white, or Australian, especially in the suburbs of Perth,” she says. “One thing that was a little bit surprising to me was realising that there has been this whole history with the [internment] camps,” she says of the estimated 5,000 Italian men and women living in Australia who were dubbed “enemy aliens” and sent to camps during the second world war. “It wasn’t really taught to me in school.”
It was decided early on to retain the mid-90s setting for the play and allow the “similarities and echoes” between Josie’s experience and the cycle of othering and assimilation experienced by successive waves of non-Anglo migrants in Australia to speak for themselves. (Coincidentally, Alice Pung’s 2014 novel Laurinda, which explores similar themes of migrant families and private school drama, is being adapted by Melbourne Theatre Company in August).
For Rajan, the intergenerational bond between the three Alibrandi women – Josie, her mother Christina (Lucia Mastrantone), and her nonna Katia (Jennifer Vuletic) – remains the heart of the story. “That felt very familiar to me from my cultural background – that domestic space being this kind of lodestar you return to, to understand yourself and your culture.”
It’s a thread Macri has also appreciated: “I think there’s this really rich complexity of seeing these women who are so alike, but so shaped by their different generations, the times they grew up in and what was expected of them when they came of age.”
Spanning hurtful shouting matches and moments of vulnerability and understanding, these tumultuous relationships were vividly captured on the page and screen by Marchetta. For Rajan, it meant Looking For Alibrandi isn’t just a coming-of-age story for the teenage Josie, but all three Alibrandi women who find liberation in their own ways.
“That word ‘emancipation’ is really interesting,” Rajan says. “When I was adapting it I was in Perth with my mum, and she used the word randomly; she was talking about a cousin, she was like, ‘You know, she really needs to emancipate herself’, and I think there’s something in that idea of freedom, and the complexity of it.
“For a lot of migrant girls, and the first generation of any age really, you often feel that the freedom you’re seeking is away from whatever the home space is, and whatever culture that represents. I think that’s something that she has to come to terms with.”
For Josie, that freedom initially means trying to imagine a place for herself among an Anglocentric, private school-educated establishment that is toxic in myriad ways – personified by her crush John Barton, the troubled heir to a Liberal party dynasty. In the film Josie (played by Pia Miranda) wistfully jokes: “I could just imagine them letting a wog be prime minister” – a line that hits differently in 2022 even if the toxicity remains.
“It’s been interesting with [Anthony] Albanese being elected and people being like, ‘It’s our first ‘diverse’ prime minister – he’s Italian!’” Rajan reflects. “And like, yes and no. I think it says more about Australia that it’s happening now in 2022.”
Marchetta was elated to see Albanese elected – but not because of his Italian surname. “The previous party in power had let us down on so many levels especially with regards to issues of the environment and gender and violence towards women,” she says.
“Part of Josie and her grandmother’s experience, 50 years apart, is about feeling alienated, being bullied, dealing with ignorance and passive racism and trying to work out her identity in a country that is still inherently racist regardless of how many times we say the word ‘multicultural’. Our experiences may not be the same, but that feeling of not belonging is a coat we’ve all worn.”
Looking For Alibrandi runs 9–31 July at the Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre in Melbourne, then heads to Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney from 1 October
