The conceit behind “Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant’’ is that an avant-garde theater troupe has somehow been put in charge of running a roadside restaurant. Idealists all, the actors are determined to fill not just the bellies but also the souls of their patrons. So as they prepare and serve a modest but tasty meal, they also put on a show — but not before one of the characters makes one thing very clear to the audience: “This is not dinner theater.’’
Oh, yeah? Then what’s with those passionate renditions of Styx’s “Come Sail Away’’ and Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Shining Star’’?
But they are artists, you see. Would dinner theater feature a character introduced as the “right-hand dramaturg’’ of Conni Convergence, the absent owner and impresario? Would dinner theater be interrupted by a naked man running through the restaurant, or ask us to contemplate a character who reclines on a bar, reading one of Willy Loman’s most heartfelt passages from “Death of a Salesman’’ while flanked by guys dressed as a bee, a bear, and a dog?
Why, this ensemble is so consumed with lofty cultural purpose that its members even perform a stylized ballet while delivering the salad course.
The evening’s emcee goes by the name of Muffin Character Hanshake (Rachel Benbow Murdy), and her avant-garde credentials are impeccable: Back in the day she used to do “urination paintings’’ with Andy Warhol, and she once performed “The Divine Comedy’’ without vowels.
(Watching from a nearby table at the performance I attended was a singer with a few avant-garde credentials of her own: Amanda Palmer, who will play the emcee in an upcoming American Repertory Theater production of “Cabaret’’ at Oberon.
Muffin squabbles with her egomaniacal brother, named Peter’s Character (Peter Lettre), a prototypical legend in his own mind (he claims to be one of the original von Trapp children, inexplicably left out of “The Sound of Music’’) who frequently seems bent on upstaging his sister.
