Geoff Sobelle plays with his food in Food, an often slapstick show with serious underpinnings about humans’ relationship to what they eat.
Geoff Sobelle’s Food at BAM Fisher is performance art of the most engaging kind. It provokes rumination about man’s relationship to nature, to the use of the environment, and to the distance between tilling the earth with dirty hands and the meal that arrives on a plate at home or in a restaurant. If that implies an overly serious purpose, it is brightened by Sobelle’s interactivity with his audience, his deft sleight of hand, and slapstick that veers into carnival sideshow.
Sobelle pours for the early arrivals who have claimed seats at the table.
Sobelle, who created Food (with Steve Cuiffo, who devised the magic) and codirected it with Lee Sunday Evans, begins in a low key. With 30 audience members on each of three sides of a gigantic table bisected by a red runner, he lights a candle at one end; then, from the opposite end, he persuades the audience to focus on the flame as he pulls the runner slowly toward himself. Hypnotically and playfully, he intones, “we’re not falling into a trance, but if we were—but we’re not.” He asks the audience to think of the last thing they ate: “Was it lovingly prepared? Did you buy it? Did you enjoy it?”
Then his soothing voice leads listeners backward—“farther back, into the womb,” then “all the way back,” to an ocean, as “a nameless, formless being.” Eons afterward, “fins become feet, flippers become hands,” and land becomes mankind’s environment. Eventually, he says, “with your hands you pay with your credit card.”
Sobelle prepares eggs for a restaurant diner order. Photographs by Stephanie Berger.
After lifting the candle and blowing it out, Sobelle distributes microphones and scripts to various attendees. The list of wines is read out: they include Bordeaux, malbec, a “nutty Cabernet,” and a “dirty little Brooklyn Beaujolais.” Sobelle himself pours, even accommodating a woman who wants a nonalcoholic wine. “Of course I have that,” he tells her, scurrying to one of several bar carts placed around the auditorium.
Naturally, the wine is followed by food. Sobelle carries a microphone around on a salver and gives it to various people, along with menu-sized scripts to recite from. One man reads: “Tonight I prepared a meal of ancient Cypriot soup. It’s made of couscous and yogurt.”
Sobelle then challenges the audience: “You’re sitting at an American-style diner. You have an oversize menu with really helpful photographs,” he says. How many people know what they’d order? Hands are raised. The answers come quickly: “Bacon cheeseburger.” “Tuna melt.” “Pastrami and eggs.” Sobelle then begins to fill the orders (part of the pleasure of the evening is that it’s not always clear how Sobelle manages the audience manipulation.)
The next segment is slapstick. A woman asks simply for eggs, and the actor goes behind the upstage wall; the audience hears a chicken squawking; seconds later, amid a flurry of colored feathers, Sobelle comes out carrying several eggs. He breaks them into a bowl and then takes it to her with a “Bon appetit!” To fulfill some orders, there’s clever sleight of hand. For arctic char, Sobelle dresses in goggles and a fur parka. (The arctic winds whistle in Tei Blow’s multifarious sound design; Isabella Byrd’s lighting here is a frigid blue.) Smashing through the “ice,” Sobelle puts a flopping fish on the woman’s plate.
When his service is completed, Sobelle clears the table. Removing wine glasses, he murmurs, “You folks get home safe now.” And to one participant: “Thank you. You’re my favorite.” Then, relaxing amid the unfinished meals and the profits for the night, Sobelle smokes a cigarette. Soon he becomes hungry, and what follows is pure carnival geek show. Celery becomes a sword-swallowing exercise, and as his hunger increases, even inedible objects become “food.”
After serving diners frantically, the “waiter” Sobelle finds a way to relax.
The evening takes a more serious turn with an unexpected change of scene. The restaurant becomes an expanse of prairie dirt, where buffalo roam. Eventually a toy combine scutters along, with wheat sprouting up behind it. Barefoot and digging into the earth, Sobelle pulls up buildings; then he finds oil. The pace quickens as derricks and factories appear—audience members are enlisted to place toy structures on the stage area. Pretty soon the agricultural space has become urbanized, and car horns are heard.
“When we first came, we ate ice, then we ate sand,” the host intones. “We ate leaves and insects and anything small we could catch.” Mikes are provided for the audience to join in reading the litany of foods: “bear, deer and horse meat” and “tomatoes, celery and cinnamon.” Despite the title, food itself is less important than the questions Sobelle raises about mankind’s treatment of the earth that gives us sustenance.
Geoff Sobelle’s Food runs through Nov. 18 at the BAM Fisher Fishman Space (321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit bam.org/food. Seating is general admission, so the table is first come, first served.
Creators: Geoff Sobelle, Steve Cuiffo
Directed by Geoff Sobelle & Lee Sunday Evans
Lighting design: Isabella Byrd
Sound design: Tei Blow
Magic: Steve Cuiffo
