Carl Capotorto

Carl played Little Paulie on HBO’s The Sopranos from the show’s third season on, and has performed principal roles in the movies Five Corners, American Blue Note, Men of Respect, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, and Mac (written and directed by John Turturro), as well as in short films by John Patrick Shanley, John Turturro, Tim Robbins, Peter MacNicol, Adrian Grenier, and others. He makes a brief appearance in Penny Marshall’s Riding in Cars with Boys and has guest starred on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Twisted Head, his darkly comic memoir about growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s and 70s, is due out from Broadway Books in Spring 2008. Carl’s solo show of the same name (the literal translation from Italian to English of Capotorto), has been presented in several editions to sold-out houses at Michael and Victoria Imperioli’s Studio Dante, the West Bank Café, and Comedy Central Stage (LA). He has also performed his solo comedy material at the Laugh Lounge, the Laugh Factory, the Improv, and on the bill of Fired! at Second Stage, Comedy Central Stage, and the Skirball Center in LA, which performance (produced by LA Theater Works) was subsequently broadcast on National Public Radio as part of its 20th Anniversary season of The Play’s The Thing. His work appears in the book Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, & Dismissed, edited by Annabelle Gurwitch, published by Simon & Schuster. As a dramatist, Carl’s plays have been presented at the National Playwrights Conference of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center (three seasons), Yale Repertory Theatre, the Vineyard Theater, Theater for the New City, Bowerie Lane Theater, the Actors Studio, Ensemble Studio Theater, and numerous other venues. He received a screenwriting fellowship from the Chesterfield Writers Film Project at Universal Studios and has received grants and fellowships in playwriting and screenwriting from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. Following his Albee Foundation fellowship in 1984, Carl was invited to become Foundation Secretary and personal assistant to Mr. Albee, a dual position he held until 1989. Carl has an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University School of the Arts. He has worked for many years as a Teaching Artist for Manhattan Theatre Club, in which capacity he conducts playwriting workshops for incarcerated adolescents attending high school facilities on Rikers Island. He is a native of the Bronx and now lives in Hells Kitchen, three blocks away from the building in which his mother was born nearly a century ago.