Unconventional career choice

Italian-Canadian actress stuck with show biz, and it’s paying off

Immigrant parents put in a lot of work to raise kids who they hope will exceed their expectations and fulfill their “new world” dreams. The problem comes when those expectations differ and all the kids’ “hard work” just doesn’t look like, well, work.
This was the problem faced by Riva Di Paola, an Italian-Canadian actress now based in Toronto and working on putting the Italian-Canadian experience on stage and on TV.
After almost 15 years in the business – including a three-year stint as Tina in the long-running dinner theatre show, Tony ’n’ Tina’s Wedding, and the voice of Rebecca Chambers in the video game Resident Evil - the bubbly and smiling Di Paola says her parents are finally starting to see that acting is a legitimate way to earn a living.
“They’re much more used to it now,” Di Paola says about her parents’ reaction to her career choice. “But they did not encourage it [back then]. Nobody talked about it,” she laughs.
Her Italian father (originally from Pescara) and Irish mother were expecting her to do something more conventional. And even though Di Paola knew she was meant to act (she graduated with a theatre major from the Etobicoke School of the Arts), she did not want to hurt her family.
After five years abroad, working and touring as a performer, Di Paola decided to move back home. “I came back to Toronto in my mid-twenties and started apologizing to my mom,” says the 31-year-old, with a laugh.
Di Paola values her family and their opinions, so it’s not surprising that family and human relationships (especially in the Italian community) is something that she is always exploring in her work.
Along with regular gigs doing voice overs for commercials and reading for radio, Di Paola has just finished a month-long run at Kensington Market’s Bread & Circus theatre, playing the part of Jill in the third installment of the ever-more popular episodic play Inch of Your Life by Massimo Pagliaroli.
“The story revolves around three Italian brothers who are figuring out their relationships to each other,” Di Paola explains. Jill is one of the love interests. “She’s kind of drawn towards this group of Italians,” Di Paola says of Jill. “They don’t care who you are, where you’re from. She’s drawn to that kind of roughness,” she says.
“Most of my characters are the girlfriend, the girl next door, the wife,” she says referring to her past roles on television and on stage. “To have an opportunity where I get to wear high heels and a short skirt and flirt with the guys and talk about sex like it’s just … bread and butter is really kind of neat to play,” Di Paola says with amazement.
Offstage, Di Paola is writing about what it means to grow up Italian in Canada in the The Dessert Club, a TV series she’s writing with Dina Pino, a former cast member of Tony ’n’ Tina’s Wedding (she played Di Paola’s bridesmaid) and now close friend.
The Dessert Club looks at the lives of four young first-generation Italian-Canadian women in Toronto who are stuck between modern lifestyles and old world values. Last year the series got a development grant from SunTV.
“Our effort is to try to create strong female characters on TV and in theatre,” Di Paola says. “A lot of female characters are the secondary characters, or the prostitute or the waitress,” she says.
Di Paola gets high marks from her writing partner. “Everything [Riva] touches turns to gold. “She’s extremely perseverant,” she adds, saying that Di Paola is very good when it comes to setting up meetings, making contacts, and finding opportunities to pitch their series.
“She gets somewhere at every step. If anything, I would have trouble keeping up with her,” Pino says about her co-writer. “But I don’t think that’s a bad thing! It’s been non-stop. She has a real eye for business,” Pino says.
And despite the repeated apologies to her family for putting them through the wringer, Di Paola cannot imagine doing anything else, even in Toronto, a city where the entertainment industry is notoriously cash-strapped and tough on newcomers.
“If I wasn’t doing this? There isn’t anything else I could do. It is such a cutthroat business and it’s so unstable. And in my case, you hurt your family. There are so many risks you take to do it that if there were anything else I could do, I would have done it. But honestly, I couldn’t live without doing theatre.”

Publication Date: 2009-08-30
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=9383