Thirteen years ago, in a church in Edinburgh, I saw a show that I still think about. Two nonspeaking office-drone clowns attempted to go about the day at their bleak, dingy corporate workplace. But there were tendrils slowly curling out of the watercooler, and a very alive-looking weasel kept appearing between the filing cabinets. Eventually, the clowns, played by Charlotte Ford and Geoff Sobelle, were no match for the invasion of living taxidermy that gradually took over the stage. Outside the windowless offices, the Anthropocene was over — somehow these hapless menials had missed its bang or its whimper — and the prehuman food chain was busy reasserting itself. Come morning, all this would be vines, bracken, and bears.
The show, created by Sobelle and Ford, was called Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl. Sobelle’s newest work of funny-eerie physical theater is called FOOD — but the two pieces could swap titles and lose none of their clarity. (Indeed, the drab business-prison of Flesh and Blood was called “Convenience Foods,†and Sobelle and Ford spent a good deal of time microwaving dismal-looking frozen meals before the wildlife became too distracting to ignore.) Sobelle — who makes theater that dances with slapstick, illusion, and installation art — is fascinated by the scale of humanity, at once so laughably puny and so catastrophically vast. Whereas Flesh and Blood jumped ahead to a point on the apocalypse timeline where Walmarts and WeWorks are returning to dust and people to their essential reality as vulnerable animals, FOOD stays closer to home. It’s pre-apocalyptic, which is to say, it’s about now. Using the seemingly simple lens of his show’s title, Sobelle zooms out to reflect on how crushingly, irreconcilably enormous — and how precipitous — the human footprint currently feels.
Co-directed by Lee Sunday Evans and Sobelle, and co-created with Steve Cuiffo, who’s credited as the show’s “Magician,†FOOD takes place around a huge dinner table, complete with white cloth and place settings. There are bottles of wine, a wall with not-quite-garish red wallpaper, bland jazzy music. The setting implies “well established 3.5-star Italian restaurant — that’s Yelp, not Michelin — that isn’t trying too hard but isn’t going anywhere.†(“The knives are facing the wrong way,†said my food-service savvy partner.) Although the majority of the audience is seated in risers set an aisle’s width back from the table on three sides, those who show up early can snag ringside seats. If you do, you may find yourself feeling a bit like the characters in another restaurant-focused play across the East River: initially pampered and excited — who doesn’t love going out to dinner? — and, eventually, drawn into a darker meditation on your own role as, in every sense, a ravenous consumer.
But the show is no somber, finger-wagging affair. Sobelle loves props far more than agitprop (the program credits no fewer than nine prop creators), and for all the ache and complicity inherent in the play’s arc, the performance remains light, buoyed up by a flow of sleight of hand and ingenious object play. Though it’s an intermission-less 90 minutes, FOOD consists of two clear parts — one might call them “Dinner†and “After Dinner.†During the first, Sobelle, the only performer, scurries and swishes around the room in the standard white shirt/black pants/black vest, waiting on the audience. Real wine is served (“This is a very interesting bottle,†he mutters with autopilot erudition as he pours for one audience member); menus are passed out along with microphones on trays so that we, the “guests,†can chime in when called upon; orders are taken; food appears, some real, some not so much (don’t expect actual dinner). Throughout the service, the spring in Sobelle’s step grows more tense and mechanical. His smile subtly hardens. “I’ll have the arctic char?†ventures one audience member, reading a prompt from her menu. “The arctic char. Certainly,†Sobelle beams through gritted teeth — before donning goggles, a parka, and snowshoes made of silver serving trays held to his feet with cling wrap; mounting the table in a sudden blast of blue light and howling wind; trudging through the blizzard (crunchy snow Foley provided by a plastic bag crinkling into a microphone), dropping to his knees, and “cutting†a hole in the table-ice out of which he yanks a wet, flopping fish. It’s still thrashing when he drops it on the audience member’s plate, announcing with a beatific grin, “The char.â€
The fact that the fish is a battery-powered prop makes no difference to the visceral, mixed-up rush of delight and horror occasioned by this moment. We lean in like children when Tei Blow’s sound design and Isabella Byrd’s lights transport us to the North Pole; we gasp and pull back when the fish shoots out of the ice. Then there it is on the plate, and it won’t stop moving — and the lights are warm again, and the elevator music maunders in the background. We’re brought face-to-face with the systems our meals have to pass through, the miles they have to cross, the disturbingly feudal nature of the service industry, the mind-boggling reality of a limitless, seasonless, globalized diet.
If “Dinner†is a little tilted, a little disquieting, it’s also full of showmanship, a kind of winking, sideshow charm. But then FOOD pivots. The show reaches its fulcrum — the shift into “After Dinner†— with an unsettling sequence in which Sobelle’s waiter, finally off the clock and stripped of his friendly mask, begins to munch on the various leftovers that have accumulated throughout his shift. He eats, and eats … and eats — and though his increasingly feral gorging is aided by some nimble tricks of misdirection, he also, for real, downs a lot of food. It’s funny and it’s revolting. It lasts too long, and it’s meant to. There’s a transition happening, away from tablecloths and silverware, smooth jazz and interesting wines, towards basic, undiscriminating hunger. From this point on, there is no more language in FOOD. The show’s second part is murkier, dirtier, more physical and more animal — it’s a gradual dance through the Anthropocene, here still very much in progress.
It’s not the narrative that’s striking here: If the goal of FOOD were simply to accuse (“Look how we’ve ruined the planet!â€), the show would quickly shrivel up from sheer lack of surprise. Instead we’re carried along by the wondrous unfolding of the play’s physical world. Sobelle’s set is a pop-up book, a box of tricks that evoke awe not in their flashiness, but in just how scrappy they are, how full of a craftsperson’s wit and care. Byrd and Blow’s transformations of the space slow our heartbeats and unify our breathing as the lights dim, and a muted, shifting soundscape envelops the room: the huffing of bison, the thrum of a tractor, the rising and falling surge of an expressway.
Part of the impact of Sobelle’s ethos — sometimes mischievous, sometimes meditative, always meticulous — comes from its embrace of the essentially childlike side of theater-making. Whether or not he’s co-creating his shows with an official magician, he always gives the impression that he’s about to pull a coin out from behind your ear and perhaps turn that coin into a bird. At the start of the play, he “lights†a fake candle, smirks with us over its artificiality, then asks us to close our eyes and listen. Later, when we open them, the candle — stranded in the middle of the vast table, too far away to be fiddled with — has a real flame. It’s a gorgeous metaphor for the whole theatrical project: Our job, in this porous space, is to imagine illusion into life. In FOOD, the enchantment of artifice runs through the heavy mantle of reality in little golden threads. It doesn’t change the weight of the known world, but it does make us want to look more closely, to grant it more awe and attention.
FOOD is at BAM through November 18.