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Theatre in Review: The Big Meal (Playwrights Horizons)

The Big Meal begins with a chance meeting between Sam, a young man, and Nicole, a waitress in a restaurant, and it ends, several decades later, with us contemplating the world they made together. It's a 90-minute mini-epic that requires only six adult actors, two children, and one waitress to evoke a universe's worth of laughter and loss. Over the next few days, you're going to hear the name Thornton Wilder bandied about in connection with the playwright Dan LeFranc, and it's true that The Big Meal plays like a direct descendant of The Long Christmas Dinner, and maybe also The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. But LeFranc has plenty of skills of his own, including a nearly faultless ear for the clichés, evasions, and hidden meanings buried in everyday discourse, and he has a grand time decoding his characters' fraught conversations.

LeFranc speed-walks us through his family saga, which is constructed out of bits and pieces of conversations held in restaurants over the course of a half century or more. Sam and Nicole's chance meeting turns into a date, which turns into a no-strings sexual encounter, which leads to romance, which leads to marriage -- and that's the first ten minutes. These scenes, featuring rapid-fire overlapping dialogue, have the acuity of a Nichols and May sketch. Cutting through first-date niceties, Nicole asks, curtly, "You wanna mess around?" "I am a male," replies the nonplussed Sam. (Cameron Scoggins, as Sam, delivers that line in a hushed series of ascending half-tones, as if stunned by his good fortune; it's only one of many hilarious line readings in Sam Gold's production.) When Sam proposes marriage, the panicked Nicole can't quite focus on the import of it all. "Oh my god, Sam, seriously," she asks, "don't you think I should be wearing underwear for this?"

Ready or not, Sam and Nicole dive into marriage and family life, acquiring in-laws and children and siblings and other hangers-on as they go. LeFranc mines plenty of amusement out of their halting attempts at serving as role models for their rambunctious son and daughter. "Not all sounds are fun sounds," says Nicole, vainly trying to squelch a noisy child who is acting out in public. "I just want you to know I'm always here to help you make your own decisions," says Sam, by way of telling his son he's too young to get married. When the marriage comes off, anyway, Sam uses the reception as a bully pulpit, warning the baffled young couple, in a metaphor so lame you'll think it was written by Mitt Romney, "Love is not California. With love, there's a lot of storms and hail and sleet."

The actors approach this tale of multiple generations in tag-team fashion. Scoggins and Phoebe Strole play Sam and Nicole as frisky young singles, with David Wilson Barnes and Jennifer Mudge taking over when they become harried spouses and frazzled parents; Anita Gillette and Tom Bloom see them through their sunset years. When not taking their turns as Sam or Nicole, they're ready to show up as other members of the family circle. (The children's roles are taken up by Rachel Resheff and Griffin Birney.) That leaves Molly Ward as the mysterious waitress, an angel of death who appears from time to time, placing a dinner plate in front of a character, who eats in silence before disappearing from the story.

These moments, so unsettling in contrast to the comic chatter that prevails most of the time, happen more and more often in the last half hour or so, as death cast its ever-lengthening shadow over the characters. As opposed to the first half, which finds humor in modern mating rituals, the hellish challenges of raising children, and the nagging fear of becoming a replica of one's parents, The Big Meal gradually becomes a meditation on how to keep going on, struggling for grace, even as the losses pile up.

Gold is quickly becoming the go-to director for plays that pose enormous technical challenges. Like Circle Mirror Transformation, which he also guided to success at Playwrights Horizons, The Big Meal seems virtually indecipherable in script form. But with the aid of an especially nimble company, he orchestrates LeFranc's cascade of flash-forwards as one generation gives way to another, keeping us in the loop so we always know where we are and who we're with. He also handles the transition from farcical comedy to darker, sadder truths in seamless fashion. In a cast loaded with nimble quick-sketch artists, I have to single out Barnes for the deftness with which he shows Sam slowly turning into his boorish, overbearing father, and Gillette as Sam's mother -- among other things, allegedly the inventor of the Cadillac margarita - who can make the simplest non sequitur ("You think the mole sauce has trans fats?") into a piece of absurdist hilarity.

Also making fine contributions are David Zinn's scenic design, in which a series of tables, large and small, roll into place just in time for the next meal. His costumes are solid as well, as is Mark Barton's lighting, which tracks the script's mood shifts with remarkable accuracy. Leah Gelpe's sound design makes good use of a disco remix of "Sweet Caroline," among other effects.

I suppose some will dismiss The Big Meal as derivative or a one-joke affair; neither is true, although I would add that it goes on for about five to seven minutes too long, as the author seems to search for just the right swan song. But this is a fine introduction to a writer who clearly thinks like a playwright, with a gift for framing his characters and action in purely theatrical terms. He's well-known in Chicago; this is his second New York production of note. As far as I'm concerned, he's a real find.--David Barbour


(21 March 2012)

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