Mina (Susannah Flood, left) and Ben (Greg Keller), have dinner on a first date that might just end with the end of the world, in Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal.
An underlying anxiety is on display in Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal about the appeal of his absurdist play: exhibit A is a character listed as Audience Member in the program (Stephanie Berry), who interrupts the proceedings about 30 minutes into the show to offer a detailed explanation of why she is not pleased:
Is this a play about restaurants or the people who work there? I’d happily watch a play about that—if it was different.
Take a stand! Inspire action! Touch our hearts—or at least you should try!
We’ve given this gift to you of our evening—one of our precious few nights on this earth—and you’re showing us this?????
Erin Markey plays Christina, the restaurant’s chef, who also has other guises.
It is a funny moment, but it’s unclear if Audience Member is meant to be a satire of a playgoer who wants to watch something “normal”—rather than Koogler’s free-associative, surreal, theater-of-the-absurd nonlinearity—or if the critique is genuine. (For some viewers, myself included, parts of the outburst will ring true.) Later in the play, a Waiter (Hampton Fluker) raises a wineglass and offers congratulations to the audience “for making it this far. Don’t worry—we’re almost at the end.” There’s that anxiety again.
Staff Meal opens with a brilliant sequence between a woman, Mina (Susannah Flood), and a man, Ben (Greg Keller), who every day sit at adjacent tables working on their laptops in a café, and acknowledge each other with increasingly awkward greetings. The montage, with time passing indicated by supertitles and by Masha Tsimring’s lighting design and Tei Blow’s sound design, becomes a hilarious deconstruction of a “meet-cute,” with Flood and Keller, both terrific, just slightly off-kilter. Eventually the flirtation takes them to dinner at what is supposed to be a great restaurant, where they wait interminably while their waiter searches the subterranean wine cellar and, in the meantime, regale each other with increasingly bizarre stories (Ben’s past life as the victim of a shipwreck on a boat that was not HMS Titanic but sank around the same time; Mina’s suspicion that she might be the rat from Ratatouille, etc.).
The play then pivots away from Ben and Mina into the bizarre and cryptic world of the restaurant. The servers (Jess Barbagallo and Carmen M. Herlihy) worship the restaurant’s guru owner, Gary Robinson, and interrogate the new hire (Fluker) on Robinson’s philosophy, while the chef Christina (Erin Markey), easily offended by anything the new waiter says, prepares the staff meal from behind an opening in one of the sliding walls of Jian Jung’s set. Markey also portrays a Vagrant who lurks around the café at the opening and then at the restaurant (with a drawn-out twist of sorts related to other aspects of their identity).
Two servers (Jess Barbagallo, left, and Carmen M. Herlihy) share a staff meal. Photographs by Chelcie Parry.
Is the restaurant meant to be a satire, mocking the staff’s cultlike devotion to Robinson and their overall insularity, or a celebration of the community the restaurant fosters, which we hear a lot about but don’t ever see? There are clear parallels to creating art, though the metaphorical connection isn’t fully developed. The inconsistent tone and glacial pacing of the restaurant scenes, under Morgan Green’s direction, make it a relief when the Audience Member interrupts; but if it’s supposed to be a relief, why, then, does nothing change afterward?
Much of the dialogue and situations after the opening scene lean so much into bizarreness for its own sake that there doesn’t seem to be an attempt to reach the audience on a genuine emotional or intellectual level. And yet it appears Koogler does want to “touch our hearts,” but this impression derives more from material about the play than from the play itself, including the writer’s eloquent account in the playbill of the play’s pandemic context (it was written from January to April 2020) and the show material that describes “a group of lonely city dwellers who gather for comfort and connection in an environment of exemplary hospitality, as the world breaks apart.”
Returning post-dinner (and, perhaps, post-apocalypse) to Ben and Mina, there is a heartrending scene of disconnection between them, mirroring the sudden losses and absences that so many people experienced during COVID. But this glimpse of what the play might have been vanishes, as the action returns to the now mostly disassembled restaurant, where Fluker’s Waiter enjoys a solitary meal as things turn increasingly eerie, but also opaque. Staff Meal offers a taste of the sublime, but ultimately feels unsatisfying.
Staff Meal runs through May 24 at Playwrights Horizons (416 West 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday–Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit playwrightshorizons.org.
Playwright: Abe Koogler
Director: Morgan Green
Sets: Jian Jung
Lighting: Masha Tsimring
Costumes: Kaye Voyce
Sound Design: Tei Blow
Illusion Design: Steve Cuiffo
