- Title: Feast
- Written by: Guillermo Verdecchia
- Performed by: Rick Roberts, Tamsin Kelsey, Veronica Hortiguela, Tawiah M’Carthy
- Director: Soheil Parsa
- Company: Tarragon Theatre
- Venue: Tarragon Mainspace, 30 Bridgman Ave.
- City: Toronto
- Year: Until April 27, 2025
A feast can leave you full and content, or bloated and queasy. It’s hard to know when to draw the line at a buffet, whether it’s filled with delicious dishes or interesting ideologies. In Guillermo Verdecchia’s two-hour, intermission-free Feast at Tarragon Theatre, directed by Soheil Parsa, four characters try to fill the hole created by our current end-times ennui. Turning to conspicuous coping mechanisms of consumption, security, altruism and revenge, they find their desires may never be sated.
Rick Roberts stars in Guillermo Verdecchia’s Feast, which explores family conflict and the gastronomical world.Roya DelSol
In its sprawling ambition and heated commentary on numerous intersecting world issues, such as the far-reaching effects of colonialism, climate change, globalization and consumerism, Feast parallels another entry in Tarragon’s 2024-2025 season. In the similarly named Crave, privileged characters are also knocked off course by the encroachment of the hungry outside world.
While Feast contains similar problems to Crave in feeling somewhat overstuffed and rootless, the Governor-General’s award-winning Verdecchia has a surer hand with the expansive material, resulting in a show that’s a bit frustrating, but more than a bit fascinating.
Consultant Mark (Rick Roberts) and lawyer Julia (Tamsin Kelsey) live a comfortable life with their daughter, university student and champion swimmer Isabel (Veronica Hortiguela), and unseen son, Xavi.
Mark’s nebulously defined job of buying and selling has him constantly travelling to different countries, where he sees exotic locations through car and hotel windows on the way to meetings. An old photo of his family at the beach grounds him, but when he loses it, he becomes unmoored.
Meanwhile, a series of natural disasters puts Julia on the defensive, as she deals with her fear of the future by gradually creating a fortress of a home that neither the displaced masses nor the climate apocalypse will be able to steal.
Under Parsa’s direction, Kaitlin Hickey’s understated but effective set displays the transparent plastic panels of a featureless corridor, representing both the interior of the family home and an endless airport walkway to nowhere. From 1993′s Fronteras Americanas to 2024′s El Terremoto, Verdecchia as both a writer and director has shown a fondness for creative projections; Hickey’s provide a surtitle-like strip above the stage that displays quotations about longing and Google Maps images showing where to find the nearest Starbucks in Beirut.
Mark’s beloved Starbucks is Verdecchia’s metaphorical stand-in for global homogenization – the ability to travel anywhere and feel like you never left home. Its twin-tailed siren logo represents the one temptation Mark can’t seem to resist: A barista’s explanation of terroir (that the soil of a place imparts a specific character to its food and drink) initially fills him with terror, and then a fierce longing to become one with his surroundings by ingesting them.
This temptation fits Feast’s Faustian nature, established in an opening scene where Isabel condemns the availability of out-of-season fruit as a bargain that’s cost the soul of the planet, while Mark just wants his daily breakfast banana. Verdecchia also nods to Greek mythology, naming the nearby mountain where Julia nostalgically books a family vacation as Mt. Kithairon, after the legendary location of Dionysian bacchanalia where non-believers were torn apart by their loved ones.
There’s a haunting, rotten emptiness at the centre of Feast that might be too much to bear if it weren’t for the show’s emotional core of Isabel, full of fear and sadness about the future she feels has been stolen from her generation. Yes, she has a teenager’s self-righteousness and understanding of how to save the world, but Hortiguela’s bone-deep sorrow and conviction elevate the character beyond a Gen Z talking head.
In two of the show’s best scenes, she talks to one of her parents. Julia begs her daughter to stay safe at home, while Isabel mourns an environment that is disappearing and rendering her vulnerable in any location. Her mother holds her tight, but her long-distance conversation with her father is a study in technological disconnect, the lag on the line cutting them off each time they try to reveal a heartfelt truth.
Sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne gets creative here, using extra amplification throughout the play to denote internal monologue and slight vocal distortion to show the distancing impact of communication by phone or through screens.
The show also receives a shot of energy through Tawiah M’Carthy’s Chukuemeka, a Nigerian living in Kenya who works out of the back of a dilapidated restaurant as a logistical “fixer” of illicit eating experiences. His sunny smiles to his new mark – Mark – war with the rage he feels at being just another consumable on the journey of another muzungu, an aimlessly wandering white man.
On the other hand, the relationship between Mark and Julia feels less considered and grounded, a consequence both of Mark’s wandering and some awkward, abrupt writing that suddenly removes the more interesting warmth between them, leaving strangers.
Feast can’t quite decide whether it wants to be a surrealist fantasia or a morality play. It’s more successful when it’s the former, examining Mark’s dislocation at the quirky Centre for Avant-Garde Geography or spinning a tale of a once-a-century gathering of gourmands to devour the endangered and mythical. Some of the multiple threads of fate it spins feel more like loose ends, and what is resolved with a message feels oddly pat.
But that’s the thing about a feast – it’s all about excess. You take what delicious morsels you can stomach from the heaping table, and leave the rest behind.
