I couldn’t think of anything smart to say about Francesca D’Uva’s hilarious, moving, and deeply life-affirming show This Is My Favorite Song (other than go see it and bring everyone you know), so I cheated and texted her with a few professional journalistic questions: “Are you Catholic?” (I often get confused about the denominations – you guys have so many labels!) to which she replied “Hahahahaa.” And then, upon realizing I was being sincere, wrote, “Technically yes but not in practice.” This was a hard blow because I had planned to use this thread as a backdoor way to write about Christian evangelicals and their obsession with Israel. Having exhausted that angle, I then asked her “Were you a theater kid?” because I was planning to make a beautiful if anecdotal argument about theater kids fleeing to comedy because it’s a quicker way to mainline approval, but Francesca shot me down yet again: “I wasn’t a theater kid. I like musicals but I wasn’t in them. I was in godspell in 6th grade that’s it.” Classic Francesca D’Uva, refusing to wrap things up in an easy bow, just like she does in Song, meticulously directed by Sam Max and titillatingly lit by Zack Lobel and surgically dramaturg-ed by Celeste Yim. 

At one point in the 80 minutes of Francesca talking and singing and joking and dancing, in her signature lesbian-next-door style, she innocently shares, “And the pastor of our church was so cool, like just a really funny and nice guy, and he’d even take some altar servers for drives in his convertible to go to the town pool. So cool. I never got to go to the pool in his convertible, cause he only took boys and I’m a girl.” This is classic D’Uvian (D’Uvanian?) alchemy, like a cheese plate where the crackers look like Wheat Thins but they are actually the intergenerational terror wrought, globally, and for centuries, by the Catholic Church. That’s a D’Uva! What else is the job of the queer child if not to sift through the weird things we inherit, to try to make them into something pretty, or funny, or edible for our friends? Am I projecting? Tell me if I am, OK?

There is something naughty about comedians having shows in real theaters. I should specify that by comedians I mean gay comedians, as I have yet to encounter any straight comedians. Comedians having shows in real theaters is like dressing up in your parents’ clothes, or maybe more accurately having sex in your parents’ bed? I fear I have overreached (I know some might make a government joke here but I just don’t have the energy.). It was a thrill to see Francesca’s singular comedic style gently evade and enliven the strictures of the One-Person-Show, building on its first run in 2022 at Abrons Arts Center, a longstanding incubator for those fleeing and fusing and founding genre. It is always a pleasure to be in Francesca’s audience, because you know you are safe – the joke is not on you, or even on her. It’s like we’re waiting at the DMV and she’s making us laugh. “I never even realized my dad was a man,” she divulges like we’ve just become best friends.

Francesca perfectly parodies the fraught relationship that maybe every solo performer has with their audience (I have long-advocated for “solo performer” to be entered into the DSM, which I think could help raise awareness), that she experienced acutely following an unexpected loss:

I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS SHOW 

I AM A VICTIM OF THE AUDIENCE’S EYES 

YOU LAUGH WHILE I CRY INSIDE 

I AM A VICTIM IN AN INDUSTRY OF LIES

YOU LAUGH AS THE SEA LEVELS RISE 

She is vulnerable without taking herself seriously. You totally get why she’s a great nanny, which she tells us all about in the show. She’s a real judgment-free zone. It’s a sleepover – it starts giggly and gets deep. 

What emerges is a beautiful and at times heartbreaking tribute to her father, who died of COVID in June 2020, one of over a million people who were fatally abandoned by a government that consistently prioritizes profit over people. This is the backdrop of the show – what does she do with all that interrupted grief? And what do we do with our own, when there’s more to grieve every single day, more unmourned and disregarded life, more premature death everyday? And more to come, as Christian nationalist fascists take full control of the US government, making immigrants and trans people and teachers and so many other internal enemies their boogeymen to exile and vanquish.

In her kindergarten Christmas Concert where they recreated the nativity story (“it’s when Mary had to give birth to Jesus in the back of a hotel in the hotel’s farm, because all the hotels were booked”), Francesca is cast as a cow, despite her aspirations to be, well, a human. We accompany her through her fantasies of being the central object of desire, or the central protagonist, or the central storyline, or the central anything. We are the kids she is nannying in her song “Nanny Franny,” and are hanging on her every word, knowing somewhere we are learning about morality but mostly just enjoying the story, fantasizing that she has nowhere else to be but here, with us. 

It is the queer child who so often takes on the responsibility of figuring out what to do with all the inconvenient things left over from childhood, all the disappointments and the unfinished conversations, and then tries to turn them into a play. She may not have been a theater kid growing up, but she is one now, offering us other kids a story before bed so that we might wake up in fewer pieces.