Delicious meal doesn’t quite fit the spirit of the show

July 23, 2010|Devra First, Globe Staff

‘This is not dinner theater!’’

The cast of “Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant’’ delivers this message at the beginning of the show, which tells the story of what happens to an aging performance artist, Muffin Character Hanshake, when she decides to become a mother.

But it is theater with dinner. A number about making a baby involves a soup pot and an egg dropped from high above — and then your actual soup is served. It’s chilled cucumber, made with yogurt, lime, and basil. The sacrifice of a deer (this is avant-garde theater) segues into the much more humane salad course. It’s a mix of watermelon, feta, and mint, and cast members blob it directly onto your plate using their gloved hands. At some point, pulled pork sandwiches with broccoli slaw are served. And there is an, um, climactic scene involving symbolic bananas and whipped cream wielded by men in Jockeys and flowered kimonos. They’re making fruit salad. You don’t have to eat it — your dessert is a dense Cambridge Cream Pie.

The food is quite nice. It’s lovely. It’s refreshing, simple backyard barbecue food, made with local ingredients from places like Stillman’s at the Turkey Farm. But it’s comfort food. There’s not really anything avant-garde about it.

In this sense, it’s a wasted opportunity. It doesn’t reflect the spirit of the show, and it could. It’s not on equal footing with the performance but a gimmick to get people to come. The creativity, wit, and occasional wisdom of “Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant’’ rarely make it onto the plate.

There’s one notable exception. Partway through the performance, a “doctor’’ visits each table, writing fake prescriptions for anyone who says he or she isn’t feeling up to snuff. The cure? “Gintermission.’’ One signs on without knowing what, exactly, this entails. At intermission, the patients file into a room. The door is closed behind us, and we are each given a medicinal measuring spoon, the hollow handles filled with a viscous pink liquid. Then, we are instructed to turn to the left, reach out our right arms, and pour the thing down the throat of our neighbor. It’s surprising, exciting, fun, awkward, provocative, and mysterious. We’re asked to trust the performers and one another, and we do.

In other words, it works as theater, in the same way the Manderley Bar did in the American Repertory Theater’s “Sleep No More.’’ It’s of a piece with the performance, not apart from it.

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