Playwright’s Perspective: Francesca D'Uva

I come from a long line of musicians on my mom’s side. Her parents were professional touring musicians from Peru. My grandpa, who is 102 now, can still play any tune by ear on guitar and piano. On the other hand, my dad quit playing the clarinet because his friends told him that the clarinet wasn’t cool, even though his band teacher said he could go to Juilliard. He told us that he always regretted quitting. He also told us a story about one time  he was singing along with a song in the car as a kid and his favorite uncle told him to stop because he had a terrible voice. 

But every holiday, my dad would sing songs and pull out his clarinet and play La Tarantella. And my grandpa, the actual musician, would accompany him on the guitar. Everyone would tease my dad about how he could only play one song and not very well and we would all laugh. But my grandpa never laughed at my dad. He was just happy to have someone to play with. 

Those were my first influences. Musicians like my grandparents who were technical and could play anything, and people like my dad who let musical technique take a backseat in favor of the entertainment value. And so I became a musical comedian. 

I didn’t perform comedy for over a year between March 2020 and September 2021. That was partially because of COVID-19 shutting down the comedy scene, but also because I lost my father to COVID in June 2020. The funny thing about it was that when I wasn’t performing comedy, I didn’t miss it at all. I actually felt like I might never want to perform again. I didn’t know whether it was because of my personal grief or the collective grief of the world, or the entanglement of the two. 

When I started performing again in the fall of 2021, I was only interested in performing new material because the thought of doing any of my old material made me nauseous. Like I would be entering a fun house mirror version of my former life. So I started working on a musical which contained a fever dream sequence where the Virgin Mary and Mrs. Claus have a romantic affair. But every time I performed what I was working on, it felt horrible and pointless and unfunny. 

Then I wrote a song about the only thing I knew at the time: that I did not want to perform at all! And it was the first thing I’d written in years that actually made me laugh. I felt like I had figured out that I had been trying to outrun my reality on stage. And my reality was that my inner feeling of safety and peace, a product of my happy upbringing, had been completely shattered by grief. The only way I could return to comedy would be if I embraced the ways I’d changed. I started performing old material again and it didn’t sting as badly as I imagined. And with my director Sam Max, I was able to turn my experience into a show where I straddle the line of my past and present identities.