The Toronto Theatre Review: Crow’s Comfort Food
By Ross
Messily making Belgian waffles for the lazy Saturday morning kids and adults, one with a stereotypically sweet homey chocolate smile and the other with a more complex mature stew of fruit, a framing of the generational divide and cultural war is plated almost immediately within Comfort Food, a new play by the lead star, Zorana Sadiq (Factory’s Armadillos). The title is also the name of Bette’s television cooking show, and although it is meant to feel cozy and connective, the air is sharp with some other form of electricity. After diligently transforming Crow’s smaller studio theatre into a television studio kitchen, lit authentically by Echo Zhou 周芷會 (Stratford’s Cymbeline) with a solid sound design by Thomas Ryder Payne (Crow’s Wights) and a sharp video design by Tori Morrison (Factory’s I Don’t Even Miss You), the framing sits cleverly true, although something about Sadiq’s Bette feels off. We, her now captive studio audience, clap and smile along as she produces the segment with an anxious, brittle edge, filled with pauses for corrective suggestions fed into her earpiece from an unseen producer. She seems like a host on the edge of a sharp cliff, nervous that she’s going to be nudged off, but pretending with all her might to act casual and cook with comfort.
As directed by Mitchell Cushman (OtM’s Performance Review), she never really achieves that on-camera charming connectivity, forever feeling like anxious sparks are flying off her, making it all a bit hard to believe, much like her eventual return to smoking. It doesn’t balance in her hand just right for us to buy into it all, especially the more we engage with this formulaic set-up, that is, until it reforms itself into the kitchen of her home, with the son she was determined to create, like those messy scraped-off waffles. He used to be her sidekick, happily joining her, and maybe even leading her, into her YouTube television persona, but now, as with many a teenage boy, a brooding heaviness has taken over her KitKat, played with a not-so-subtle intensity by newcomer Noah Grittani (ESA’s Macbeth), and a sharp trouble is baking its way in between them.
Maybe this is the dough where her erratic, neurotic electricity is rising from, as her home life has shifted far away from those sweet pictures we see of the two of them delighting in the making of comfort food for their YouTube audience. She barely cooks at home now, playing the pseudo-perfect homemaker only on television while living on a diet of tension and concern for her son and the darkness that seems to have taken over him. Her son, KitKat, framed in a fraught fury light at his computer screen, is awkwardly blocked off from us by a set, created by set, props, and costume designer Sim Suzer (Crow’s Bad Roads). With his back turned away from us, awkwardly a part of the kitchen metaphor but not really, the play dives deeper and deeper into his structured, locked-up anger and frustration, focused on a destructive, oblivious world that feels out of control with little self-awareness of its addiction to comfort. It’s a framing that we can fully comprehend, and we connect to KitKat’s harsh resentment, weighed down by melting glaciers and the approaching climate devastation that surely waits for no one.
The blocking and structure of the space tend to work against itself more than half the time, getting in the way and forever needing to be shifted and rolled around into constructions that don’t make the whole homey sauce feel organic or authentic. Much like the dialogue, I’m sorry to say, that fluctuates from medium to high without thoughtful lead-ins or clear pathways. The organic ingredients are all there for some thoughtful unpacking and consumption, like their complex mother/son relationship. But the elevation of antics and disturbances between the two brought on by combative concerns around the destruction of the planet through unconscious consumption, the pull of the dark web into overwhelming anger, the corruption of the internet through algorithms that seem aimed at division, and the oblivious desire to try to smooth all things over with the making of some galaxy sliders and other Comfort Food items, makes us back away rather than lean in.
Grittani shows great flexibility as other creations are brought on the show for “devil’s advocate” interactions with an increasingly overwhelmed Bette over more planet-friendly approaches to sustenance and cooking. Still, the basic ingredients required for a more emotional connection to the mother and son are blocked off and back-turned. The culture wars that are mixed up before us are unrealistically elevated to levels of profound disrespect and then de-escalated into something else with a too easily crafted push and shove, grown in secret for sweet consumption, much like the loaf of sourdough that has been filling the studio air with its warm aroma throughout the show. The play is fascinating in its conceptualization, working hard to dismantle the very thing it presents to us so carefully and consciously at the beginning, causing most to clap for the Comfort Food setups, while also beating those eggs hard in an existential critique and crisis. It almost burns down the place to make a quick point that doesn’t land so authentically, nor feel as organic as intended. “Where’s the pleasure in that?” is all that I could reconnect to as I made my way out, chewing on the goodness of sourdough bread while contemplating the end of the planet.
