Family Business: (A)Pizza Play

On graduation weekend in 2010, Janice is exhausted, her mother Francesca is slipping, and Mi Caro Apizza — the Carbonizzatto family shop — has offers on the table from buyers who would franchise it, flatten it, or fold it into someone else’s future. As Faith dreams of taking over the place she already calls home, the restaurant’s walls open onto 1929, 1949, and 1989, revealing the generations who built a life around dough, tomatoes, loss, jokes, and impossible standards.

Inspired by the real stories of New Haven’s apizza pioneers, Family Business: (A)Pizza Play follows the fictional Carbonizzatto family across nearly a century of immigrant entrepreneurship and neighborhood change. Lucrezia, Francesca, Janice, and Faith each inherit more than a recipe: they inherit labor, pride, debt, grief, love, and la magia dell’apizza — the pizza magic that turns a small shop into a family’s memory and a city’s mythology. Created with CitySeed, Sanctuary Kitchen, and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the play asks what we owe to the people who came before us, and who gets invited to carry the business forward.