“And My True Love Gave To Me!,” an original play from Luigi Jannuzzi, will be playing at Hudson Theatre Works in Weehawken through Dec. 16.
Jannuzzi, who has been working with the publishing company Samuel French, Inc. since the early 1980’s where he writes and produces theater productions, had an idea for a Christmas play.
“This play is a new full-length. A lot of theaters do “It’s a Wonderful Life,” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” and they are staged readings, because there aren’t many Christmas plays,” he said. “So the question was could I come up with some sort of play for the holiday season? So I was trying to do that.”
Based on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” “And My True Love Gave To Me!” centers on an 8-year-old girl who will not go to sleep until her 17-year-old brother reads her a story before bed, which happens to be “The 12 Days of Christmas.”
“The brother doesn’t want to because he wants to go out on a date, but the problem is he cannot use the family car until his sister is asleep,” he said. “So he starts reading the story, and the girl is very imaginative and creative. She has all of these requests, like on the first [day] she wants a frog, in the second she wants a vampire and so what happens is that all of her dolls and stuffed animals come to life, and tell the story that we see.”
The play, which still has a script for a frame of reference to the actual story, incorporates improvisational elements with the actors portraying the stuffed animals and dolls.
“They are all really creative, imaginative, funny and whacky,” he said. “It’s a great chance for a theater company to do improv. The dolls and the animals that come to life, those actors have to do improv because they are in all of them. They are frogs and dogs and cats, they have all these different characters that they have to take on.”
Jannuzzi, who put a lot of faith into director Frank Licato’s hands when giving him the script, felt Licato had a lot of enjoyment when bringing his work to stage.
“The interesting thing is when you write something, you give it to a director and the director can put their creativity into it,” he said. “The actors then can do theirs, too. That’s what is fun about it; you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s what is neat about this. It’s up to the director and the actors to tailor it and see what they want to do.”
Throughout the play, there are 12 smaller stories, each one going off of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” but they also incorporate what the son and daughter are going through in their own lives.
“I was always trying to write something for the holiday season and it’s very difficult because you try to include everybody that you can,” Jannuzzi said. “I was just thinking and this idea came up. Everybody kind of loves that song and that song has such a wide span. So I thought base it off of some kind of abstract, crazy, very comical group of people doing improv with the storytelling – especially with a little girl’s imagination – it may work. You just keep taking chances; sometimes you have a hit and sometimes you don’t. It worked out really well.”
Jannuzzi, who has written several shows over the course of the past 40 years, as well as winning the Samuel French Off-Broadway writing competition on three separate occasions, feels that when it comes to writing you need to keep pushing forward.
“You get what you deserve in the writing business,” he said. “You get in there and if you hang in there, you stay in there. You submit stuff and you get rejected so many times, pretty soon you get an acceptance and it makes all the difference. It’s one of those things where it’s a current underneath you. If you have that current and it keeps you going, you’ll keep getting up every time you get rejected.”
“And My True Love Gave To Me!” is playing for one weekend only at Hudson Theatre Works, 80 Hauxhurt Ave., Weehawken, through Dec. 16. For more information, call 201- 472-5123 or go to www.hudsontheatreworks.com.