Playwright
Dan LeFranc is giving an explosive master class in extended metaphor with his
striking, poignant, and almost farcical The
Big Meal, which just opened at Playwrights Horizons.
LeFranc's
expansive new play rides on one overarching idea - Life is one big meal, and
today no one has the time to cook it. Here, the contemporary American experience
is displaced from the living room, and set, I’d say more
appropriately, in a chain restaurant (designed by David Zinn). It is a conceit
that sounds contrived when read or heard outside of context, but within the
framework of LeFranc’s play, these meals are absolutely breathtaking
and astoundingly resonant.
It
all begins with the meeting of Sam and Nicole – a first date
that gives life to an eighty year long story of a multi-generational family,
depicting marriage, squabbles, children, teens, birth and death. In just under
two hours, people come and people go; tables get added; tables get taken away;
and at its peak, The Big Meal's dinner
table spans just short of the entire width of the stage.
And
on that bland looking dinner table, many appealing, delicious, and, most
intriguingly, literal plates of food are nibbled, enjoyed, and scarfed down –
And not stage food like wimpy iceberg lettuce or crumbling Wonder Bread, but creamy
pasta, grease-packed burgers, and other rich items mimicking the rich potential
of a life well-lived. And the actors really eat them.
God
here is envisioned as the restaurant’s zippy waitress
(Molly Ward) carelessly dropping your plate in front of you at any given
moment, and taking it away without consideration of whether you’ve
taken your last bite. When an actor finds a plate in front of him, he easily
and gracefully picks up his fork and eats. No frills, no spoken-word aria of
woulda coulda shoulda - just simple eating.
The
entire experience reflects that ease. The
Big Meal is physically very modest, but structurally not so much. Each
scene typically lasts no more than a few minutes, and the shifts in time and
place are quick, subtle, and entirely actor-driven. As the play begins, the
feel is reminiscent of David Ives’ quainter one
acts, but it quickly transcends the quirky, perhaps gimmicky nature of its
methodology, creating ample, textured drama. Director Sam Gold stages the play
in a deft way that removes his directorial hand, and allows this hardworking group
of actors to just act.
The
ensemble of nine depicts several generations of one family at different stages
of their lives; smartly changing up their personalities to reflect not only
their physical age, but also the world they grew up in.
David Wilson Barnes plays a middle-aged
man, often a parent, and he is covered in that awkward, cringing sense of humor
that embarrasses so many a teenaged daughter. The middle-aged woman, Jennifer
Mudge, has a parental authority that can turn to youthful ambivalence with a
moment’s notice. The two young children, Rachel Resheff and Griffin Birney, are
annoying, as they should be.
As the older man and woman, Tom
Bloom and Anita Gillette, change with the decades, portraying the shifting
outlooks of different generations elderly people. Gillette’s final moment is
profoundly moving, and will assuredly stay with you for a long time.
Moving
thought it may be, the play never exploits empty sentiment, although there is
ample opportunity for it to do just that. LeFranc writes much of the dialogue
in a realistic, overlapping manner that leaves no room for preciousness or languid
rumination. These characters have places to go and people to see.
Cleverly
LeFranc represents that syrupy relationship milestone, the wedding, with only a
minute-long, condensed highlight reel of the reception - with the whole family
dancing their brains out and screaming an upbeat, techno version of 'Sweet
Caroline'. And when it comes right down to it, we all remember the wedding
reception better than the wedding, right?
An
absence of pushy sentiment aside, there has not been a more moving piece of
theatre onstage this year than The Big
Meal. And it stirs the emotional center without exploiting easy feelings.
It’s not a nostalgic play, as so many familial
Americana plays tend to be, but an intelligent, theatrical conjecture. It’s
a clip show of events, some insignificant and some major, but the tear jerking
moments are all harnessed in the speedy interaction, broken up by the heart
wrenching meals.
During
its Chicago run at American Theatre Company, many favorable and deserved
comparisons were made to Thornton Wilder’s seminal work, Our Town. Our Town, if you’ve never been to high school, is
about the ups and downs of life in Grover’s Corners, New
Hampshire in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. But beyond both of these
plays being temporal (yes Our Town is
entirely temporal) explorations of family life, the similarities stop. Our Town reflects upon a calmer time
when our actions were elongated, and we sat back and smelled the flowers, and
Wilder relates war to the undoing of all that.
The Big Meal takes place during a different, but nonetheless
significant, crossroads in American history – the Scientific Revolution
redux, displaying the effects 24/7 technological intervention will eventually
have on today’s American family. And I’m
not just talking about computers and iPhones, but also our inundation with
television, the ability to carry our entire music library in our pocket, and the
expectation that we must be perpetually reachable by phone. The world has
changed for better or worse, and if you are resistant to that change, you may
resist the play as well.
The Big Meal certainly hits home in contrasting
ways with people of different generations. LeFranc, with his final scene,
frames the play as a cautionary tale - implying that our nasty habit of
immediacy and instant gratification is perhaps detrimental to our society’s
future and our own personal sustenance.
At
the end of the play, Nicole, the first we became acquainted with, is a great
grandmother, with her great granddaughter knowing her only as “lady”
and we the audience struggling to remember which character the older actress is
playing at this point.
The
idea that it is nearly inevitable that we will forget our ancestors, even the
living ones, troubled me greatly. In the short time since I saw the play, I’ve
looked at how I treat my family with far greater consideration than I did
before. I maybe didn’t get to know every character with the
familial intimacy of a well-made play, but I approached getting to myself a little
better - a more worthwhile achievement, in my opinion.
The
night I saw The Big Meal, there were
a actually few families in the house. My favorite moment of the play, and the
moment which assured me of its genius, was a particularly outspoken reaction from
a child sitting close by. There is a craftily staged scene where the same twentysomething
actor (Cameron Scoggins) and actress (Phoebe Stroll) play a parade of
boyfriends and girlfriends, all with the same basic characteristics, but with
different names – and, for the life of them, the
parents cannot tell the difference.
The
little boy in front of me impatiently blurted out, “I
don’t understand what’s
going on!” and I silently thought to myself, “Oh,
you will…”-Johnny Oleksinski
'The Big Meal' runs through April 22 at Playwrights Horizons.
