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On Monday night, members of A Broken Umbrella Theatre gathered in the theater company’s rehearsal and performance space in Westville to roll the clock back to 1929, close to the origins of New Haven’s apizza culture.
In the scene they rehearsed, Pete Jr. (Otto Fuller) wants to introduce his friend Charles (Jonah Alderman) to the rest of his family: mother Lucrezia (Susan Kulp), Cousin Mike (Matt Gaffney), and Uncle Jimmy (Lou Mangini). Mike and Jimmy, behind the counter, roll out dough and slide apizza in and out of a brick oven. Charles isn’t there just to make friends; he wants a job.
The family is ingratiating, and deferential to their matriarch. Lucrezia’s the one who makes “la magia dell’apizza” happen, Mike and Jimmy say. That means she’s the one Charles needs to impress. Pete Jr. vouches for him. His mom and sister are hard workers, he says, and Charles will be too. Lucrezia looks him over.
“Wash your hands, we have 200 batches to rise before tomorrow,” she says.
“Thank you ma’am,” Charles says. “You won’t regret this.”
“I know I won’t,” Lucrezia said. “We are family.”
The scene from 1929 is just one of several from A Slice, a piece Broken Umbrella is developing about the history of apizza in New Haven for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. It’ll be performed June 18 and June 19 at Next Door at 175 Humphrey St., and the ticket price will include a helping of apizza and a talkback in addition to the performance.
“We had thought about this one for a while,” said company member Aric Isaacs. “Coming out of the pandemic, we were looking for something that was going to bring people together. What is the one thing in this town?”
Pizza “unites,” said member Jes Mack, “and equally divides.”
The idea to develop a theater piece around pizza first emerged among the company members about a year and a half ago, when member Ruben Ortiz pitched the idea as a hip hop opera. “Maybe he just wanted to do something by himself,” member Matt Gaffney joked, explaining that Ortiz was possibly the only company member who could pull something like that off. The ideas kept coming, and under Mack’s direction, the concept moved toward a play.
“And a song,” Mangini added.
“We all have many jobs and we all wear many hats in this company,” Mack said. They had already partnered with the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which was interested in having Broken Umbrella perform for this summer’s festival. Developing a truly full piece would take longer than they had. But they could develop “a slice,” Mack said. Arts and Ideas was “on board,” Isaacs said.
In creating the piece, the company benefited tremendously from having among its members New Haven historian Colin Caplan, who had literally written the book on New Haven apizza. Caplan gave them an overview of pizza history starting with Greek pizza millennia ago and encompassing the 16th century, when tomatoes were finally imported to Europe from South America. “We did a bunch of reading and research,” Mack said, and then “spent a lot of time” talking about a personal question: “what is your pizza story?”
They discovered that “everyone from this area” had one. A family ritual of eating pizza on Fridays. A job that ordered a certain type of pizza for events. That sense of family drew them to the families that created the a pizza places that, in turn, created New Haven’s apizza culture.
The people who founded Pepe’s, Modern, and Sally’s “are all related,” Mack said. That led Broken Umbrella to develop its slices along three times: 1929, 1949, and 1989, tracing the generations of apizza in New Haven, the births of the Big Three, and the legacy they have created that led, just recently, to a statement in the U.S. Congressional record declaring New Haven the country’s pizza capital.
Mack, as director, declared the first scene rehearsed, for the moment, to her satisfaction. “That’s something real,” she said. “That feels like something’s happening.”
The company moved on to the next scene, in which the young Pete, Jr., as a lark, suggests putting clams on a pizza. His older relatives are appalled. Who does that? It’s 1929 and the world isn’t ready for clam apizza. But it will be soon.
Together, the company fleshed out the characters in their show further, adding poignant conjecture to the places where the facts ran out. What if Cousin Mike had served in World War I, and the trauma he suffered meant that making apizza was one of the few jobs he could do because it was relatively quiet compared to a factory job? What if Frank Pepe himself, who served in World War I, had learned to sling apizza after apizza by feeding troops? They talked about the many ways the people they played were swept up in the whirlwind of history, from war to industry to culinary stardom. In 1929, that history was just beginning; likewise, Broken Umbrella was just getting started.
A Slice runs at Next Door, 175 Humphrey St., on June 18 and June 19. Visit Broken Umbrella’s website for tickets and more information.