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Public History on Stage, “Mickey & Joe: Good. Bad. Ugly. Dirty.”

Author: Cassandra Marsillo, public historian and artist. PhD student in the Department of History at Concordia University and Editor of Bridging, the IFPH Blog.


Michaela Di Cesare as Dirty Mickey and Matteo Cremon as Joe in Mickey & Joe: Good. Bad. Ugly. Dirty.
DIRTY MICKEY

Tell me the truth.

You've been in hell this whole time, haven't you?

JOE

Hell? No.

I've been...

Hmm

An exact account is challenging

What with permanent and temporary exhibits

Museums alone… about 100

And over 50 piazzas around the world

Several hundred streets, vias, avenues

I've got statues in

Rome

Milan

Nice

New York City

Montevideo

Buenos Aires

Sao Paolo

Trafalgar Square

Washington

So many bars where children and adults speak my name

Because there's a cocktail: Campari and orange juice

But there's also a gelato: chocolate, coffee and nuts

Deduce from that what you will

I'm in the aisles of grocery stores up and down the UK

Biscuits, of course. For tea time.

Raisins sandwiched between two cookies. Disgusting.

There's a bright red fish named for me

A fashionable women's jacket in the Victorian era

A mountain in British Columbia

There's a bust of me in every community centre

Of the Italian diaspora

Don't believe me? Go check.

In this monologue from Michaela Di Cesare’s Mickey & Joe: Good. Bad. Ugly. Dirty, Joe tells the audience, and Dirty Mickey, all the places he’s been since his death in 1882. Those with a knowledge of Italian history (or alcoholic beverages and snacks), might deduce who he is meant to represent in this play, which made its world premier in Montreal at the Leonardo Da Vinci Centre this past May.

Set 155 years after the ‘unification’ of Italy, Dirty Mickey finds herself trapped in limbo with her sworn enemy, Joe. She hails from the dark Southern underbelly of an otherwise glorious country and fought in the resistance. Joe was the golden boy of the Risorgimento (literally, resurrection), forever remembered as a political hero.

In Mickey & Joe, Di Cesare, playwright and actress, asks: What happens when Mickey, an outlaw who was silenced, murdered and erased for Joe’s benefit, now threatens his legacy? More broadly, in this work, she confronts audiences with important questions about our accepted historical narratives. Who gets remembered? Who gets forgotten? Why? I interviewed Di Cesare about her research and writing process, and how this play fits into conversations public historians have all the time.

One of Mickey and Joe’s many duels.

Official/Unofficial Narratives

“There are official/unofficial narratives in history. Oftentimes, in my work, I’ve come up against that, like when I was writing about Luigi Pirandello’s wife [for the play In Search of Mrs. Priandello],” explained Di Cesare when I asked her about what role historical research plays in her writing process. “My niche, my goal,” she continued, “is always to unearth, dig up what is not written about, or what is not documented.” With this latest work, she delved into the history of Italian unification. Time and time again, she came across secondary sources and commemorations that reiterated the same official narrative with its central hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi (Joe). 

Di Cesare incorporated this into the play: “I wanted to show just how many iterations of him and how much of him is in written records, but also public imagination.” This became an interesting juxtaposition to Dirty Mickey, representing Michelina Di Cesare, a brigantessa (brigand) who fought against Garibaldi’s men and was killed for it. Throughout the play, the two characters often bring up the fact that Dirty Mickey is only commemorated through one small plaque. Dirty Mickey, or Michelina Di Cesare, also happens to be the playwright’s ancestor.

When Di Cesare began her research in Canada, she came up with absolutely nothing but a Wikipedia page about Michelina. In the summer of 2017, she received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to undertake research in Italy: “I went to Mignano Monte Lungo, where Michelina is from, and–to my surprise–I discovered a wealth of oral history.” Michelina was, in fact, commemorated in many ways beyond the plaque. “There are people in these villages that reenact battles from unification, dressed up as their favourite brigands,” Di Cesare explained, “It’s actually a very solemn, serious activity. They have festivals where they eat ‘brigand food’, dance, hold processions, and listen to speeches.” At these festivals, people are aware that this is the undocumented history and that it is their job to preserve what no one else has. 

In Mignano Monte Lungo, Di Cesare also met Maria Cristina Verdone and Angelo Andreoli, a couple who runs a museum out of their house. As they told her about the festival and processions, they divulged that the town mayor never attends because it’s “too political.” That’s when Di Cesare realized how precarious this history is. “On the day of Michelina’s death, August 30, they do an entire event dedicated to her,” she described, “Her history is told in the shadows. It’s passed down orally and it’s not published. That became a big angle for the play.”

Di Cesare and I spoke about how, as Italian-Canadians, we have little knowledge of the controversies and discourse around the counter-narrative to Italian unification. We actually don’t even know much about the official narrative. We chatted at length about this issue: how did she decide what historical context to include in the play? It wasn’t straightforward: “I was a writer in residence at the Centaur. The first few drafts had a lot of characters, with a chorus to move the history along. Then COVID happened and I was asked to make it a two-hander. I can’t even imagine going back to the way it was because it really streamlined the central argument and struggle.”

Accuracy vs. Authenticity

Audiences don’t need to be provided with the entire historical context, she argued, as long as they can emotionally and dramatically tap into the struggle that was happening between these two people. Di Cesare synthesized a lot of the history in the character’s physical actions, how they fought and what they said when they fought. Nevertheless, she wrote many drafts of the play trying to find that balance: “So many versions still had too much information,” she said, “These people need to be heightened characters living through a drama. Everything they say to each other has to be for a reason, and not necessarily to give the audience exposition.” When I asked Di Cesare about her understanding of the difference between accuracy and authenticity, she quoted Elena Ferrante: “Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer.” As such, she is more concerned with emotional truth than the accuracy of the details. 

She and her director, Daniele Bartolini, actually had some disagreements over some of Di Cesare’s literary liberties. For example, she explained that while Joe is meant to represent Garibaldi, his character is an amalgamation of him and two other key Risorgimento figures: Camillo Benso di Cavour and Giuseppe Mazzini. “His dialogue quotes all of them,” she explained, “There were a lot of lines about Joe not speaking Italian but that was actually Cavour, not Garibaldi. I thought it was interesting that Cavour fought for the unification of Italy and the use of one ‘uniting’ language, when he never spoke it. I wanted to keep that detail in.” But that was too far for Bartolini, who wanted to protect Di Cesare from people dismissing the play for inaccuracy. “Not to mention the fact that Michelina’s story is almost completely undocumented,” she added, “so there’s probably so many things that I’ve decided about her that are not strictly accurate.”

She reflected on how this preoccupation with “truth” manifests in audiences, too. After one show, someone asked Di Cesare if the play was a true story.  “It’s so hard to decipher what people mean by that question,” she said, “Do you mean the events of the unification of Italy? Do you mean if these people actually existed?” The audience member, it turns out, wanted to know whether it was true that Michelina was her ancestor, and that Di Cesare went to her hometown to research her story. While this is true, the play that emerged from that research is Di Cesare’s interpretation of the research, stories, and her own experiences.

In the play, there’s a moment where the two characters grapple with the fact that they’re called “Mickey” and “Joe.” Di Cesare explained why this was necessary: “They’re like, ‘that’s weird, that’s not actually who we are; those aren’t our names.’ Same with the line about why they’re speaking English. That’s supposed to be a nod to the artifice that the playwright brings.”

DIRTY MICKEY

Not your clothes

You changed...

YOU Changed

JOE

I did.

You did too.

For starters, we're speaking English.

DIRTY MICKEY

No we're not.

I'm speaking Neapolitan

Napoleetano

Naaaah Neee Neepolee

WHY AM I ENGLISH?

JOE

I don't mind it.

Least I don't gotta listen to you butcher Italian any more.

Playwright as public historian

The play opens with Di Cesare as Dirty Mickey locked in a large box. She bangs against the drawer, shouting to be let out. Eventually, she emerges, the metal drawer rumbling open. She looks out to the audience and asks what we are doing there. Who let her out? “In my first research year,” recounted Di Cesare, “I went to a museum in Itri, Il museo del brigantaggio.” Amongst the documented brigands, she could only find men. She asked the attendant where she could find information about Michelina Di Cesare. He pointed to a filing cabinet and said: “All the women are in there.” She flipped through the drawer of index cards, image after image of brigantesse, women brigands, until she found her ancestor. “The concept of the drawer, then,” she said, “came from this very first research trip. Pulling her out of there became a central image.”

She did further research at the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento in Rome, Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano, and Museo di antropologia criminale, both in Turin. Each of these is mentioned in the play, as the characters recount where and how they are remembered and their stories preserved. Her research included secondary sources, like biographies and work by Pino Aprile and Antonio Gramsci. I asked Di Cesare if she ever felt like a historian while working on this play. She responded, “I think I’ve rejected the label of historian, in a way, to protect my work because the dramatic truth needs to be number one for me. But I’ve actually done a huge amount of academic research.” Personally, I know that when Di Cesare asked me to speak about representations of food in the play for a talk back panel after the final performance, I was inspired to, first, tell the audience that we had just witnessed a masterclass in public history on the stage. For all of Di Cesare’s insecurity about accuracy, we reminded each other that the narratives she is challenging–about Garibaldi and unification–are also interpretations of events. That’s also mythmaking: “That’s true,” Di Cesare reflected, “We often don’t consider all the biases. Garibaldi’s main biography written by Christopher Hibbert is so… you can tell that it was somebody who was a big fan. Lucy Riall’s biography of Garibaldi is post-modernist and feminist, it was a take down.”

At the last minute, Di Cesare and Bartolini decided to change the play’s final monologue. Originally, it was Michelina in first person, reflecting on her legacy. In the end, it was Bartolini who said: “We have to understand that you, Michaela, her descendant, made this happen. It’s only through you that she ends up defeating Joe because you are able, with the language, research, knowledge, and literacy, that she didn’t have, to take him down.” Di Cesare becomes this phantom that Mickey (Michelina) is looking for the whole play, asking the audience time and time again: “Who let me out? Who opened this drawer?” In its conclusion, the play reminds the audience that it is not only about rethinking Italian unification, or telling Michelina’s story, but about the story of the research process and the researcher that brought it all together.

MICHAELA

She was so many things

Soldier

Freedom fighter

Tactician

Terrona [derogatory term for Southern Italian]

Daughter

Wife

They underestimated her in all those roles

But where they really went wrong

What they couldn’t have expected

Is that the brother who betrayed her

Took in a dark fussy newborn

He raised her son

And that son carried on her name

So she has another role to play

She is an ancestor

Ancestor to the terroni who stayed

And the ones who left

Ancestor to the one with dirt on her tongue

Ancestor to the stranger who came

To a small forgotten village

And pulled on a small forgotten drawer

Ancestor to playwright

Performer

Cuntista [storyteller]

Michaela Di Cesare of Montreal

By way of Mignano

The place where they killed her
Mickey & Joe poster

Mickey & Joe: Good. Bad. Ugly. Dirty was performed at the Leonardo Da Vinci Centre in Montreal from May 17-25, 2025. Directed by Daniele Bartolini. By Michaela Di Cesare. With Matteo Cremon (JOE) and Michaela Di Cesare (DIRTY MICKEY). A Theatre Ouest End Production. Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Fondation Communautaire Canadienne-Italienne.


Cassandra Marsillo is a public historian, educator, and artist based in Tiohti:áke (Montreal), whose work focuses on immigration, identity, collective memory, food, and folklore, particularly in relation to the Italian-Canadian experience, and traditions from her family’s region, Molise. She is a PhD student at Concordia University working on the history of Italian-Canadian food in Montreal. She recently published an oral history cookbook, Dalla valigia alla tavola: A journey through Molisan culinary heritage, with the Federazione delle associazioni molisane del Quebec. She publishes two newsletters, Crivello and notyrgirls, which is co-authored with Jac Di Bartolomeo. She is the editor of Bridging, the IFPH blog.

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Bridging Editor (October 3, 2025). Public History on Stage, “Mickey & Joe: Good. Bad. Ugly. Dirty.” IFPH-FIHP. Retrieved February 11, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14ujg


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