Too Many Cooks?

Theater is supposed to be food for thought, but this is ridiculous. During the season just ending there has been a large shopping-cart of productions devoted to cooking and dining. I’m referring — not in chronological order of opening — to The Cook, Cookin’, and Cooking With Lard. Then there were Dinner With Demons and, on the London stage, Dinner, which looked and sounded a lot like Manhattan’s Omnium Gatherum. (For the record: The latter, written by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, debuted at Variety Arts somewhat later than Moira Buffini’s Dinner played the National Theatre Loft.) There was also My Kitchen Wars. Still playing at The Supper Club is Chef’s Theatre, and the grocery bag is not empty yet: Bowing on May 18 at the 59E59 Theaters for a handful of performances is Cooking for Kings, a one-man show about 19th century super-cook Antonin Careme.

While these plays may or may not be mouth-watering, what indubitably whets an observer’s appetite is the opportunity to probe a zeitgeist that offers up such items. Of course, it’s not as if food, cooking, and kitchens are a totally new theater interest. In the ’50s, kitchen-sink dramas proliferated to the extent that parodies of them were rife; lower-class types bustled around obsolescent ovens and tables with oilcloths on them and characters stuffed their faces with lower-class grub.

The trend hadn’t run its course by the beginning of the new millennium. Only last year, actress Clare Higgins prepared a roast during a lengthy sequence in Vincent in Brixton. This year, Jayne Houdyshell went through copious baking motions in Fighting Words. Over the seasons, we have seen Donald Margulies’s Dinner With Friends, A.R. Gurney’s The Dining Room, and E. L. Doctorow’s Drinks Before Dinner. Way back when, there was the Edna Ferber-George S. Kaufman play Dinner at Eight, revived only last year at Lincoln Center with designer John Lee Beatty’s dining room table serving as a symbol of plenty.

Yet there have never been so many productions coming so fast as they have over the past several months. Reviewers have found themselves regularly comparing menus and rarely have so many cooking smells wafted past the footlights to tease our olfactory nerves. I’ve spent a quite a bit of time wondering whether the chow rustled up on stage would be served to the audience or thrown into the trash and speculating on the costs of outfitting kitchens like the ones so gleamingly displayed. Additionally, I’ve been eager to discover where certain pots and pans might be purchased.

To some extent, food shows break down into two categories: those during which the smorgasbord’s shared with the audience and those wherein no repasts are passed. There was a theme-appropriate wine and cheese break in The Last Supper and, later, performance artist-writer Ed Schmidt invited attendees to join him over beef stew, a green salad, and a dessert consisting of a chocolate cross stuck into ice cream. At Chef’s Theatre, plates bearing samples of what the celebrated cooks are demonstrating is brought to tables by a battalion of waiters and waitresses. (The chefs change every week; Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Heniger demonstrated their flair with Mexican goodies on the night that I attended and scarfed everything in sight.)

But that’s about it for the boarding-house-reach shows. In the solo performance pieces Dinner With Demons and My Kitchen Wars, the monologists eat alone. The Omnium Gatherum cast kept Alfred Portale’s edibles to themselves. The reason for this is that no food can be distributed in theaters lacking restaurant licenses; Ed Schmidt got away with plunking down his modest feast before those attending The Last Supper because he didn’t officially sell tickets but, instead, asked for contributions. Chef’s Theatre is at The Supper Club, which does have the appropriate papers.

Incidentally, in some of these plays (Chef’s Theatre is really a revue), none of the characters seen do much or any chewing and/or swilling. In the first act of Eduardo Machado’s The Cook, the eponymous figure is running up hors d’oeuvres for guests of her rich Cuban employers. In Cookin’, the banquet that’s sliced and diced at break-neck speed is for a wedding that begins only as the frenetic preparers finish their assignment under a deadline crucial to what storyline there is. In the Cheryl Norris-Cindy Hanson Cooking With Lard, no cooking is done on stage and no lard wielded, but pie is sliced and dispensed.

The foregoing facts may be intriguing but they don’t explain why a trend that practically calls for copious Pepto-Bismol doses should bloat theaters now. Studied thematically play by play or in groups, they do yield answers — or, at least, hints. In My Kitchen Wars, which Dorothy Lyman adapted from Betty Fussell’s memoir, the protagonist focused primarily on her failed marriage to historian Paul Fussell. The book and the stage version posited food preparation as therapy, with the author working out personal issues as she went through her kitchen routine. (Along with the fragrance of spices, a strong smell of retribution perfumed the air.) Taking her cue from Fussell, Lyman wanted to show the heroine as mistress of her own domain as she sat down to her dinner for one, yet the gloom of unwanted solitude seemed to dominate the proceedings. Maybe cooking isn’t as fully therapeutic as one might hope, the play’s ending implied.

While Fussell/Lyman didn’t refer to demons, it’s obvious that some lurked in My Kitchen Wars. Jonathan Reynolds, a food writer for The New York Times, indicated via his Dinner With Demons title that he was exorcizing troubling parental influence as he ran tomatoes through a processor, dipped a trussed turkey into a menacing deep-fryer, and vigorously flipped a potato confection. Could it be that writing and cooking, which both have at least some therapeutic effects, are only now occurring consciously or unconsciously to playwrights? Maybe.

Omnium Gatherum and Moira Buffini’s Dinner — in many aspects the same play — suggest something else about eating and chatting within the proscenium. In both works, a group of hoity-toity conversationalists has been brought together by a gabby hostess. As they get on each other’s nerves while the appetizer, entree, and dessert make silent groaning-board noises, the event at which they’re present turns out to be more than what first hits the eye: They’re involved in something apocalyptic. What authors Buffini and Rebeck and Gersten-Vassilaros are advertising is the dinner party as emblematic of civilized discourse at a time when civilization is developing a bad case of the heaves.

No mystery as to what the playwrights are responding to, since global times are parlous and such times inspire dramas reflecting parlousness. The dinner party has been with us for some time, of course, but we all seem to know more about food now than we ever have. The interest in Careme, which Ian Kelly picks up on in Cooking for Kings may echo the notion of food as evidence of a pampered, complacent, self-involved social stratum.

Yet another possibility can be glimpsed in the plays where the soup (or whatever) is literally on. At The Last Supper and Chef’s Theatre, one encompassing presentation has been shaped from what used to be two parts of an evening out: dinner and then a show or, as in Dinner at Eight, a show and then supper. Again, it’s the influence of the age. Food itself has once again become theater. Indeed, it may be that people who were once inveterate show-goers now find that there’s more drama in dining out. The development of Chef’s Theatre could be no more than recognition by its producers (veteran musical purveyor Marty Bell among them) that if you can’t beat ’em, here’s the way to join ’em. Conversely, shows like The Last Supper, which dramatist Schmidt intends to be a send-up of religious fervor, and Chef’s Theatre may be a means by which gourmets and gourmands who aren’t particularly interested in theater can tell themselves that they’re doing the cultural thing. These may not be cheerful omens for the theater — or do they simply suggest that there are limitless ways of presenting same?

The confluence of these entertainments may be tremendously significant or, on the other hand, pure coincidence. Whatever it all adds up to, show business — like many contemporary kitchens — has indisputably been the recent repository for what could be called Cuisinart. Fleeting or lasting, it’s given a whole new meaning to the maligned term “dinner theater.”