Café Play: The Way We Dine Now (The NoPro Review)
A feast of many delights at the historic Cornelia Street Cafe
If you’ve ever been a waiter or worked in the service industry in any capacity, I bet there’s been some moments when you wanted to tell a customer just exactly what you really thought of them. Now imagine you had a severe but empathetic co-worker who made you re-think what you wanted to say and go deeper and deeper until you crafted a speech that expressed what you really felt to say from the broadest possible context — for you, for the customer, for the world, for all of us. And then you said it clearly and confidently, standing easy on your own two feet.
That’s the sort of experience Café Play has to offer.
Like previous work from Erin Mee’s This is Not a Theatre Company, Café Play is both socially conscious and disarmingly goofy. Written by Mee, Jenny Lyn Bader, Jessie Bear, and Colin Waitt, Café Play displays a causal audacity in its wide variety of approaches to the restaurant experience. From realistic dialogues to dance pieces to expressionistic monologues to conversations between inanimate objects to a heart-wrenching fugue on body-image, Café Play manages to devour a great deal by taking many small bites.
Audience members were ushered into the back room of the historic Cornelia Street Café by the host and sat down at two tops and four tops. Water and a glass of wine and a little dish with olives were provided in the late-night edition. All performances happen at a brunchy or lunchy or late night snacky sorts of times, and each is accompanied by a small treat.
The first scene was a broad piece of social satire about exes having a reunion dinner. One of them remembers the relationship with rose-colored classes, one remembers all the difficult details. Guess which one’s a historian who breaks out with a fact-filled rant about the viciously mercantile history of sugar? That’s This is Not a Theatre Company in a nutshell: weaving social satire and broad characters with incisive contextualization of everyday conflicts, often with surreal or expressionistic flourishes.
At times the omnivorous approach taken by Café Play can leave some pieces to fall flat. A segment or two seems to have had one too many subjects built in. The pieces that seemed to affect the room most deeply — Manifesto, As Old As Salt, Mary/Ann, Dance of Crayons, In the Spotlight — have a singular focus that often leads to vigorous and virtuoso performances from the diverse cast. In an evening full of characters that could have been caricatures, the cast maintains laugh-out-loud performances while holding on to the humanity of their roles.
Jimmy Shatz in particular brings a vulnerable, funny performance that grounds the evening in the dignity of surviving the sometimes humiliating world of waiting tables. The choreography and performance from regular company collaborator Jonathan Matthews brings lyricism to the evening, turning something as pedestrian as crayons on paper tablecloth into a wonderful moment of audience connection, and pattering out a monologue on feminism by Jessie Bear whose ironic whip-cracks left us reeling. Trinity Dawn Bobo’s smooth work in Colin Wait’s As Old As Salt felt both specific and timeless, taking us out of the panic of the moment into a particularly hopeful take on the history of salt. And in Kill ’Em With Kindness 1 and 2, Amanda Thickpenny wields her character’s oblivious privilage with humanity and humor.
The fractured nature of Café Play asks the audience to do some work in putting the whole together — or maybe it lets us experience the room in a more unfiltered way. I found myself believing in the world the piece created, recognizing myself in both the anger of the waitstaff, the existential dread of a cockroach, and the entitled behavior of the patrons.
Even at its most surreal, even in its trips through the social history of condiments, and even at its most brazenly silly, Café Play remains grounded in the experience of being in a restaurant. Like all of This is Not a Theatre company’s best work, Café Play brings rich context to everyday life without ever feeling disconnected from our shared experience. Café Play is a genuine exploration of the way we live now that offers plenty of laughs, charming innovation, aching vulnerability, and the bite of incisive social satire.
Cafe Play runs through November 15th. Tickets are available online and are $35–40.
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