Paul Bass Photo
Broken Umbrella's Ruben Ortiz and Jes Mack, Sanctuary Kitchen's Aminah Alsaleh, CitySeed's Christine Kim at WNHH FM.
On the turntable stage, an Italian-American family will serve brick-oven “apizza.”
Offstage, Afghan-American and Syrian-American women will serve pizza served from their own traditions.
In the process, a grassroots cultural group from the west side of town will team up with a grassroots food justice group from the east side.
And everyone gets to watch a show.
There’s a phrase to describe this kind of synergistic only-in-New Haven phenomenon:
International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
In this case, the collaboration in question teams A Broken Umbrella Theatre with CitySeed.
The theater troupe will stage an original play called Family Business: (A)Pizza Play throughout this year’s A&I Fest. They’re staging it at the evolving new James Street headquarters of CitySeed, which includes organizations running farmers markets, urban farms, refugee kitchens, and food-business incubators.
The play debuts this Friday night and runs through June 28. (Buy tickets here.)
The play itself expands on a shorter Broken Umbrella piece from last year called “The Slice,” which was staged within the confines of the dearly departed Next Door pizza restaurant. This year the two dozen actors and 30 volunteers involved in the production had full run of City Seed’s 18,000-square foot former factory complex to rehearse the piece, and the ground floor to perform it.
The play follows the fictional “Carbonizatto family’s pizza shop from its immigrant beginnings as it passes down over generations.” It focuses on the three generation of women running the operation.
“We wanted to focus on the women who are usually the the sort of brains of the operation,” play co-writer and co-director Jes Mack said Tuesday during a conversation about the play on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Brandon Fuller has designed a three-piece spinning-turntable set centered on the fictional pizzeria’s dining room, kitchen, and exterior.
Staging the show at CitySeed will introduce much of the audience to the new Fair Haven food hub. It will also introduce them to Syrian and Afghan pizza, the latter of which is made on flatbread known as bolani, said Aminah Alsaleh. Alsaleh, who came here from Syria in 2017, servs as a manager at CitySeed-affiliated Sanctuary Kitchen, a nonprofit in which refugee women cook specialty dishes for sale and train for culinary careers. They’re in charge of concessions for the run of Family Business.
In the process, they’re keeping going the New Haven story told in the play — the broader story of how immigrants pursue their dreams in our city and enrich everyone’s lives in the process.
“This is a food and love and family story, right? Immigrant chefs coming to New Haven to build a life, to find a way to feed their families, to feed the community,” said CitySeed board chair Christine Kim.
The production is a full-circle moment of sorts for the festival: In 1996, the year Anne Calabresi, Jean Handley and Roslyn Meyer founded it, a central performance was an original play about New Haven, staged on the Green by a Brooklyn-based Bread and Puppet-inspired avant-garde troupe called Great Small Works. The play covered urban renewal and modern city political and cultural history. Its title: “A History of Apizza in New Haven.”
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with A Broken Umbrella’s Jes Mack and Ruben Ortiz, City Seed’s Christine Kim, and Sanctuary Kitchen’s Aminah Alsaleh on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”