the cherry sisters
true stories from the kitchen table
The Cherry Sisters: True Stories from the Kitchen Table
written & performed
by Francesca Rizzo
Francesca wrote this profoundly funny and powerfully poignant play as a tribute to her mother. Set in the 70's Grace, a middle-aged Italian-American suburban housewife holds court in her New Jersey kitchen singing songs and weaving raucous tales of scarred childhoods and harrowing adulthoods while she waits for her three sisters to come over for "coffee and…"
The Cherry Sisters is about surviving our childhoods with a modicum of dignity and how, try as we may, our emotional scars eventually just grow together and form who we are. And how humor and song and telling stories out loud around a kitchen table is sometimes the only real therapy some of us are ever gonna get.
"If you liked My Big Fat Greek Wedding, you’ll LOVE The Cherry Sisters." says Union County Performing Arts Center executive director, Sandy Erwin. "We're thrilled to present it because we think everyone will identify with it ... I’m still laughing and crying remembering my own mother, grandmother and aunts. You won't want to miss this one."
REVIEWS
"If you liked My Big Fat Greek Wedding, you’ll LOVE The Cherry Sisters. We're thrilled to present it because we think everyone will identify ... I’m still laughing and crying remembering my own mother, grandmother and aunts. You won't want to miss this one!"
Sandy Erwin, Executive Director, Union County Performing Arts Center
“Francesca Rizzo gives a tour de force performance ... unlike the thousand or more New Jersey jokes, Rizzo and her alter ego in the play are not to be trifled with. Laugh and cry with Francesca Rizzo in The Cherry Sisters."
Ed Wismer, Cape May Star & Wave
"Rizzo plays the part of her mother, Grace, a woman who faces life head-on with wit and bravado ... (she) deserves credit for tackling subjects few would be willing to discuss in public and she does it with flair and sharp comedic timing."
Steven V. Cronin, The Atlantic City Press
"I loved Francesca Rizzo's "The Cherry Sisters." Rizzo, a fine film actress, is mercurial on stage as well ... it seems as both writer and actor she is in touch with life itself ... better than Spalding Gray, in my book."
Ray Carney, Moviemaker Magazine
"In my years working with families touched by domestic violence, it's been difficult to find entertaining material that really speaks to the problem. The Cherry Sisters offers a unique perspective that allows audiences to experience the situation on a different level. It's humor really draws you in and engages your humanity."
Marilyn Lorey, Executive Director
Rockdale Council for the Prevention of Child Abuse
“It is so important to keep an oral history of a family, to keep the stories alive with the culture, the personalities and the details from the humor to the tragedies. The Cherry Sisters: True Stories From the Kitchen Table is a testament to families, connections and relationships.""
Allison Lansky, Family Psychotherapist
Princeton Medical Center
How the Play Came About
The Cherry Sisters began as a an exercise in writing in her mother's voice that grew and grew, due, for the most part, to the encouragement of the audiences who heard it. Rizzo says, "I have to give a lot of credit to others as I fought writing this for a long time and it was only the out and
out nagging of other's who were very intrigued by these stories and kept giving me deadlines."
In its first incarnation as short play, The Cherry Sisters was invited to perform at both The Cornelia Street Café and Center Stage NY then went on to enjoy a full run at Cape May Stage. "The first time I read these stories aloud I burst into tears and I think the audience was as shocked as I was by the power of my mother's words. She was a natural raconteur and used humor to deal with the rawness of the life she and her sisters lived."
Francesca Rizzo: BIO
Francesca Rizzo is an award-winning multi-media artist (film, theatre, art, literary) who grew up in New Jersey in a tight-knit, extended family of Italian women where she has had the all too common experience of having the bed made while she’s still in it. Her Aunt Nichola, the clean freak, has been seen dabbing a little “Eue de Bleach” behind each ear before she settles in to watch her soap operas.
Born in Hillside, New Jersey, Francesca Rizzo grew up in Westfield and moved to Manhattan where she resided for over 25 years. She began her education at Monmouth University and recently was awarded her BA in Media Arts at Empire State College as well as the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Student Excellence.
She was co-Artistic Director of the Perfectly Frank Writer's Cabaret Theater in Manhattan's Little Italy and has written and/or directed over 25 plays in the last 15 years. She won accolades as a grieving Italian mother with her eye on the family fortune in the comedy Who Got What and went on to play another kind of Italian mother, Mrs. Abruzzi in Dick Wolf’s TV show, F.E.D.S. where she got to spit in the eye of the Sopranos’ John Ventimiglia. She’s also played Italian-American detective, Ruby Mazzanti, on another Dick Wolf show, Law & Order: SVU and John Turturro’s wife in his own play, Steel on Steel.
As a screenwriter/filmmaker Francesca was cited in MovieMaker Magazine as an "Artist to Watch" along with other emerging filmmakers such as Sean Penn and Vincent Gallo. After a hilarious reading of her surprisingly sweet screenplay, Mafia Wives, Incorporated, which starred another Soprano star Aida Turturro as well as Joy Behar and Susie Essman.
Cindy Adams, The New York Post wrote,
"Hollywood's now bidding on Mafia Wives, Incorporated," New Yorker Fran Rizzo's script about mafiosi women-folk who run the Mob after their men go to the slammer. She's already on a sequel…"
Leaning heavily on her humor, she wrote and performed one of Nick at Nite’s hottest promo satires about a very NOT Italian mother, the award-winning How to Be Donna Reed: A Five-part Personal Growth Workshop which gently poked fun at the world’s most perfect mom, the ever-lovely Donna Reed.
Francesca went on to write and star in Sullivan's Last Call: A sexy little film about celibacy, which garnered numerous festival awards. Recent works include her new solo show, Dames Like Her, currently in development at the Cornelia Street Cafe in the West Village and her ensemble play, “Good in Bed” which workshopped at Dixon Place.