By Sonia Ahmed
Family Business: An Apizza Play
Broken Umbrella Theater
International Festival of Arts & Ideas
@City Seed, 162 James St.
Through June 28, 2025
What makes a New Haven pizza “apizza?” Is it the sacrifices? The love? The Marzano’s tomatoes?
“Family Business: (A)Pizza Play” set out to answer these questions and more, in a Friday performance in a black-box theater at CitySeed’s headquarters in Fair Haven.
“Family Business: (A)Pizza Play” is an expansion of a shorter A Broken Umbrella Theatre production last year, “The Slice.” The play was put on as part of the city’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
The CitySeed headquarters on James Street saw a packed house of over 50 people Friday night, eager to watch the journey of New Haven’s famous “apizza”.
The play follows the fictional Carbonizatto family through multiple generations of owning their pizza shop. It’s a New Haven-specific play, with references to Long Wharf, Yale, and even Toad’s Place. As someone who’s not a native New Havener, I might not have picked up on all the references, but it was still enjoyable.
The scenes were built out on a turntable, rotating set. The three settings were the dining area of the pizza shop, the kitchen of the shop, and the outside of the restaurant. Even though there were only three settings, the play did not feel stale or repetitive at all, and the transitions were seamless.
The production is humorous — with jokes about Pizza Hut, pineapple pizza, and an emphasis on the pronunciation of apizza (it’s pronounced “ah-beetz”). This lightheartedness was balanced well by the intensity of the arguments that young Francesca (played by Teddy Anderholdt, Luciana Gardner, and Susan Kulp), one of the play’s lead characters, has with her mother regarding the restaurant.
Francesca does not want to continue running the family business, as she saw how much her mother, Lucrezia (Lisa Daly), poured into it and how much she lost as a result. However, Francesca eventually becomes just like her mother, continuing on with the pizza business and putting an emphasis on “consistency and quality” ultimately shooting down her own daughter Janice’s (Alice McGill) ideas. Francesca is not always the nicest to her mother when she is younger, telling her mom that she has no one but her, as her brother Pete and Lucrezia’s husband have passed. While that argument may have struck a nerve with some audiences, it’s realistic. Kids say things they don’t mean all the time, and parents do the same.
“I don’t want you to be my boss. I need you to be my mom,” Francesca says.
There are, however, examples of healthy family dynamics in the play as well. Faith Pepper (Margeaux Ivy), a friend of Janice’s, wants to buy the pizza business from the Carbonizatto family. Faith expresses worry because of the fact that she is African-American, and not Italian-American. Faith’s mother, Pearl (Babz Rawls-Ivy), responds by telling her that her daughter’s dreams are her own, giving her some money to take out a loan for the restaurant, and telling Faith not to doubt herself.
The play ends with a surprising but pleasant musical number with all the relatives after Francesca has a dream about Bruno Cantante, a singer, visiting the pizza restaurant.
“One slice don’t make a pie,” Bruno (Shane Quinn) says to Francesca, urging her to let others help her out with the pizza business.
The musical number featured blue and pink overhead lighting, props like mushroom and garlic plushies as well as a tomato-like exercise ball, and a dance number with pizza pans.
After the music ends, it is met with an abrupt announcement from Faith that she wants to buy the restaurant. Having had this dream and realization, Francesca agrees and all the generations of the family celebrate together.
After the play ended, I found myself wanting to watch more. This funny, emotional, musical play about New Haven pizza will resonate with any apizza lover.
