Reviewed by James Karas
Crow’s
Theatre is finishing its current season with Comfort Food, a play
by Zorana Sadiq that it commissioned. The author is also the star, together
with Noah Grittani, a newcomer to professional theatre.
Bette
(Sadiq) has a cooking show on television and she is good at it. The play opens
with a display of chopping and the making of waffles, real waffles, with efficiency
and wit, that we see projected on a screen. As the play begins, we are invited
to pop cooking questions for Bette in jar
and she may select yours during the performance. There are some questions that
she takes and answers with aplomb and wit. She also makes the wise comment that
the more you rush things, the longer they take.
We
can’t have 90 minutes devoted to cooking however well it may be done and we
soon meet Bette’s son KitKat (Grittani). She has issues with the producers of
her show but the main conflict is with her son, a bright and rebellious
teenager. KitKat is interested in saving the world. He studies blackholes, is
concerned about climate change and other issues that I could not follow very
clearly. He skips school and has a running conflict with a classmate. Bette
tries to deal with the teenager with very little success and people of a
certain age can appreciate her problem and others of a different age group may
sympathize with KitKat.
The
producers of her cooking show change the format from just cooking to a program
with interviews of guests. Grittani does quick changes into the guests on the
show and they are quirky, unorthodox and perhaps unique people that we may or
may not understand. We see KitKat engaged in social media and appearing
disruptively but very successfully on his mother’s show thus increasing his
presence on his own social medium platform exponentially.
He is trying to grow or create healthy food, for example, some kind of artificial meat that tastes like feces when his mother tastes it. He skips school and goes to gas stations where he ties up the gas hoses in protest against fossil fuels and, as I said, engages in conduct that may be incomprehensible to some.
His
disagreeable relationship with his classmate Kendra leads him to lose his
temper and push her violently. She falls on the ground and hits her head.
The
set for the play in the tiny theatre is intelligently and efficiently designed
by Sim Suzer. Two cooking tables with all the necessary utensils for cooking that
are used by Bette. What she does is projected on a screen behind her and it
works well. The tables are pushed to the side and two closet doors open for
KitKat’s place from which he connects with his social media. We see him making
films about what he does and public reaction to his posts. Again, very well
done.
Sadiq
does a wonderful job as a cook for television, a troubled single mother who had
a child in vitro and has tried to raise him the best way she could. She did not
count on teenage rebelliousness and the stresses of making a living, satisfying
the producers of her tv program and dealing with a teenage son.
Kudos
to Noah Grittani on his debut performance. As KitKat he has his work cut out.
He is an intelligent, concerned and passionate teenager. He is ambitious and,
in a hurry, to save the planet but that makes him unpleasant and, in the end,
violent. He has to change gears and represent the eccentric
guests on the Comfort Food show and gives a fine performance.
___________________
Comfort Food by Zorana Sadiq, in a Crow’s Theatre production, will run until June 8, 2025, at Crow’s Theatre, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. http://crowstheatre.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment