Tarantella

WHAT IS A FAMILY? Anthony is struggling to understand his family and its relevance to his life. Pop is a hard-edged and hard-talking man. Ma smokes and cusses and supports Pop. Paddy is more like a ghost than a brother. Rosalia is a sometimes supportive and sometimes angry sister. His relationship with his lover, Steven, is falling apart. Only Doughna Mira offers unconditional love-along with some grandmotherly advice. According to Italian legend, once bitten by a tarantula, you begin dancing slowly, at first; then, faster and faster. Either you sweat the poison from your system, or you die. -Tarantella- follows Anthony as his dance unfolds: circling back and forth through his childhood in New York, to his teen years in seemingly idyllic Merritt Island, Florida, to adulthood in Chicago. Anthony dances through the relationships and loves in his life that lead him closer to healing and understanding. Can he complete his tarantella and discover his own truth to break the generations of family dysfunction? Or, will the poisonous relationships in his life destroy him?