“Family Business” Charts Apizza Through The Generations

Susan Kulp, Shane Quinn and company in Family Business: (A)Pizza Play. Performances run at CitySeed’s 162 James St. headquarters Fridays through Sundays through June 28. Chris Randall Photos.

Lucrezia and Francesca stand in the heart of their family’s restaurant, the tension building between them. Lucrezia, dressed in black from head to toe, is explaining every reason she has to be grateful. There’s a roof over her head and running water. There’s a pie in the oven, flames dancing behind her, and a daughter who can take over the restaurant one day.

On the walls, photographs tell a story of a single family, and the business they have built. The smell of clam pie and crushed San Marzanos is everywhere. And Francesca, who just wants to be a kid for an evening, has finally had it.

“You make no sense!” she cries. Her words hang there, thick and hot. “How do you have more?”

That tension is at the heart of Family Business: (A)Pizza Play, a long-awaited labor of love from the members of A Broken Umbrella Theatre (ABUT) and several New Haven partners including CitySeed, Sanctuary Kitchen and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The cheesy, charred, clam-kissed brainchild of Jes Mack and Ruben Ortiz, it builds on A Slice (Of What's To Come), an earlier version of the show that ran at Next Door last summer.

Performances run at CitySeed’s 162 James St. headquarters Fridays through Sundays through June 28. Tickets and more information are available here.

“In these trying times, pizza is something everybody can love, pizza is something everybody can come around,” said Shane Quinn, who plays the Sinatra-like crooner Bruno Cantante, on a recent episode of WNHH Radio’s “Arts Respond.” “No matter if you have your preferences about how it’s served or what style it’s served in, it’s something we can all get around. And that’s really what’s at the heart of this show. It’s coming together to break bread in community.”    

Lisa Daly and Luciana Gardner in Family Business: (A)Pizza Play. Performances run at CitySeed’s 162 James St. headquarters Fridays through Sundays through June 28. Chris Randall Photos.

That’s exactly what the show sets out to do, from sharp, sweet humor that peppers the script to lines that are drenched in New Haven history (and tomatoes, so many tomatoes). Set between 1929, 1949, 1989 and 2010—with plenty of interludes that fill in the gaps in between—Family Business tells the story of the Carbonizzatto family, which has owned the fictitious Mi Caro Apizza for close to a century.

At the center of the story are its reluctant matriarchs: Lucrezia (Lisa Daly), Francesca (Teddy Anderholdt and Luciana Gardner as a kid and teenager respectively; Susan Kulp in her adult years) and Janice (Alice McGill), as well as Faith Pepper (Margeaux Ivy), who all but becomes family by the end of the show. All of them have made it through with a belief in la magia dell'apizza—that there is something specific and unique about New Haven pizza, or maybe the hands that pass it from generation to generation.

In the present, Janice is running the joint, as her right-hand woman (Ivy as Faith) tries to come up with the money for a business loan, and her mom (Kulp as adult Francesca) begins a precipitous spiral into forgetfulness. Around them, it’s graduation weekend 2010, and Janice is so tired. True to the story of a small family business, she’s also constantly fielding offers, which would see the place demolished or turn it into a franchise.

Through a series of flashbacks, short vignettes, and flash forwards, we learn that this is just the latest chapter for the Carbonizzattos, who built their immigrant-owned business in the first half of the twentieth century. With the help of a rotating set (snaps to Brandon Fuller, who has transformed the space), actors travel through time and space, from the 2010s to the restaurant’s scrappy beginnings in the 1920s and back. As the set rotates, those stories come to life in real time, including by the light of a glowing pizza oven. 

Noah Brown, Margeaux Ivy, and Babz Rawls-Ivy in Family Business: (A)Pizza Play. Performances run at CitySeed’s 162 James St. headquarters Fridays through Sundays through June 28. Chris Randall Photos.

That’s the magic of theater, of course, where time can be porous if you want it to be. Dream sequences, epistolary storytelling, comedic sketches and musical interludes all weave themselves into the script, with generous humor, reflective passages and the kind of deep New Haven history for which A Broken Umbrella is known. Mack, who is the show’s co-writer, producer and director, has a way of circling back to certain refrains across time and space, so that “When was the last time you ate?” becomes another way of saying “I love you.” 

The result is a gentle, genuine, totally delightful homage to New Haven pizza and its real-life matriarchs, including the late Flo Consiglio and Filomena Pepe (née Volpi). Over nearly a century, worked into an economical 80 minutes, the audience gets to know these women through both joy and unspeakable loss, through multi-generational stories, through friends and acquaintances that slowly get absorbed into the Carbonizzatto family lore.

But if this is a show about the uncompensated labor that women do every day, it’s also a show about family, about New Haven’s histories of migration, about the slippery and sticky nature of legacy, about systems that don’t work the same way for everyone. In New Haven, where the scars of “slum clearance” and Urban Renewal still criss-cross the city (and to which Wooster Square was not immune), the message sticks its landing.

Some of the show’s most interesting characters, in fact, are the Peppers, a Black family that has struggled to get a small business loan as they consider what it would mean to buy the restaurant (Babz Rawls-Ivy as the Pepper matriarch, Pearl; Margeaux Ivy as her daughter Faith and Noah Brown as her son, Curtis). As the three cycle in and out of the restaurant, they bring some of the most dynamic performances to the show, mining the past for both a cheeky humor and kind of truth-telling.

Cynthia and Dana Astmann in Family Business: (A)Pizza Play. Performances run at CitySeed’s 162 James St. headquarters Fridays through Sundays through June 28. Chris Randall Photos.

So too as Ruben Ortiz takes the stage as Eduardo, a Latino soldier (perhaps one of the 65,000 Puerto Ricans who fought for the U.S. in the Second World War, although it’s left ambiguous) who is treated with racism and disrespect when he returns home. Only towards the end of the show does he get his own kind of family moment, as his grandson recalls visiting the restaurant together for years in his youth.

Around them, standout performances abound, particularly among ABUT’s youngest actors. As young Francesca, Anderholt makes the audience fall in love with the character, particularly affecting in a sequence with “Wartime Pete” (Shane Quinn) told entirely through letters. As Anderholt sheds that soft, wide-eyed youth, Luciana Gardner steps easily into the role, and it fits her like a glove. It’s through her acting—and later, a fierce Susan Kulp—that the audience gets a feeling for Francesca’s pride and her passion, and for everything she has laid on the line for her family. 

This is true community theater, where almost everyone has a chance (or many) in the spotlight, and they glimmer as they do. Playing a handful of characters, Lou Mangini breathes comedy into the show, from a moody Uncle Jimmy to a participant in the Faxon Road Race. Brothers Nate and Theo Brown also provide comedic interludes, making the audience wonder more than once if they’re seeing double. Real-life beloveds Dana and Cynthia Astmann world-build as an accordionist and roaming chanteuse, making it seem logical when a band appears onstage at the end of the show. Quinn and Alderman delight as friends Pete and Charles, and make space for a conversation about grief, loss, and the need to push forward that feels true to running a small business. 

And of course, Kulp and McGill are a winning duo, dynamic as they bump heads, push buttons, soften and mollify, and try each other’s nerves in the way that mothers and daughters do in real life. So too Lisa Daly (Lucrezia, the restaurant’s first owner) and Gardner, as they pass dozens of intangibles (and tomatoes) from generation to generation.

“I do think we all, in working on our backstories and thinking about our characters for this play, harkened back to our families' immigrant experiences,” Kulp said in an interview before the show. “And hopefully, that’s part of what’s brought the richness to all of our characters and ultimately to this big story.”

Andrew Elliott, Alice McGill, Margeaux Ivy, and Colin Caplan in Family Business: (A)Pizza Play. Performances run at CitySeed’s 162 James St. headquarters Fridays through Sundays through June 28. Chris Randall Photos.

That history could not be more timely. A century ago this year, Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana opened on Wooster Street in June 1925, followed by Sally Apizza's in 1938. Less than a mile away on State Street, Modern—which started as Tony's Apizza in 1934—changed hands from Nick Nuzzo to Bill and Mary Pustari in 1988. Around them, that landscape has continued to grow, from Brick Oven to BAR to Zaneli’s. As Quinn’s character notes in the show, they represent the best of New Haven, a welcoming city that is open to immigrant businesses from across the globe.

Meanwhile, Alderman-Dow Iron & Metal Co. also celebrates its 130th anniversary this year, in the same vibrant neighborhood that is home to CitySeed. At its helm is Ian Alderman, who plays adult Charles in the show and is the executive director of A Broken Umbrella. In that real-life New Haven story is also the story of the Carbonizzattos, and so many immigrant families who have made New Haven into the diverse and polyphonic place that it is.

Thanks largely to architect, foodie and historian Colin Caplan, there are plenty of nods to New Haven, from the old GANT shirt factory and Canestri's Pastry Shop to the name Carbonizzatto itself, which means “charred” in Italian. It’s in this arena that ABUT does its thing, from references to clam and mashed potato pizza (actors consume BAR’s mashed potato pie onstage) to a character modeled on Frank Sinatra’s famous visit to Sally’s to a few well-placed jokes about Explo. This history is the lifeblood of the company, and it works, informing every scene as actors jump between past and present.

In that sense, the culinary analogue for this show doesn’t entirely feel like a pizza. Instead, this play is a yeasted, plaited loaf of a thing, a tradition that cuts across cultures and histories from Italy to Austria to the U.S. It could not feel more fitting inside CitySeed, where the theater company has worked closely with the immigrant and refugee chefs of Sanctuary Kitchen to provide pre- and post-performance snacks that put their own spin on the pizza tradition (this reporter will take a spinach fatayer over a calzone any day of the week, thanks). 

“None of us would be here if it weren’t for immigrants,” said Jonah Alderman, a young artist who plays Young Charles in the show. “Everybody is really from somewhere else. My family’s business, Alderman Dow, was founded by immigrants in 1895. It’s like, you need immigrants … immigrants and everybody make up America, and New Haven.”

If it feels like there’s not room at the table for one more reference to New Haven apizza—which in recent years has had something of a national moment—Family Business cuts through the noise, while also not taking itself too seriously. In the past few years, New Haven has seen pizza art, a pizza documentary, and a “New Haven” pizza migration from down the Northeast Corridor to New York City to across the pond. It can feel like a lot for a celebration of bread and cheese. And yet, Family Business suggests that there’s at least one more story to tell.

When ABUT began working on the show last year, company members could not have predicted the current presidential administration, the rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric, or the fact that they would open just hours before political violence rocked Minnesota. They did not know that opening night would be the eve of peaceful, anti-authoritarian protests that erupted across the country. They could not have predicted that Next Door, the beloved Jocelyn Square spot where they held their first performances, would close its doors in April, or that ICE activity in New Haven would escalate until the show’s history felt uncomfortably prescient.   

And yet, as it comes to the stage, it feels like an antidote. Family Business shines most brightly when it is pushing the traditional boundaries of what constitutes a family, a reminder that we are nothing without each other. At every performance, volunteers from Sanctuary Kitchen are on tap in the hall, waiting to serve up food made by some of the city’s newest arrivals. At a recent show, a gaggle of young kids sat in the front row, cheering on siblings and friends who were taking the stage. Pizza waited in the wings for the audience to eat during a post-show talkback. There was something full-circle about the moment. 

“This is about just showing up in community and being with each other,” Mack said at a matinee performance Sunday afternoon. “Just being a good neighbor.”

Performances run at CitySeed’s 162 James St. headquarters Fridays through Sundays through June 28. Tickets and more information are available here.