Review: ‘Staff Meal’

In a letter from the program, playwright Abe Koogler shares that he began writing a play in January of 2020. He finished it four months later in a world vastly different from the one in which his brainstorming began. Pandemics and viruses are never once mentioned in Staff Meal, opening four year later at Playwrights Horizons, but the impact of Covid-19 on Koogler’s play is hauntingly present.

Characters find themselves on empty New York City streets without a single cab or passerby. A tender embrace is suddenly and awkwardly ripped apart. Jobs are terminated and restaurants shut without reason. There’s a looming inability to properly connect with the people around you. A social distancing. Like so many aspects of our lives in that spring of 2020, we won’t know what Staff Meal would’ve shaped into without the interruption of Covid-19, but Koogler’s extraordinary play persevered nonetheless.

Things begin like a quirky, comfortable romcom: two strangers, Mina (a wonderful Susannah Flood) and Ben (a charmingly goofy Greg Keller), frequent the same coffee shop and after a week or so of awkward yet consistent chit-chat, they agree to a downtown dinner date. Koogler’s zippy dialogue matched with director Morgan Green’s surreal form quickly inform us of the nonlinear, almost nonsensical structure we’re about to travel through. (The first seven scenes occur within about five minutes.) Sure, Mina and Ben have their oddities, but the narrative is recognizable enough. Very boy meets girl. And then, the flashbacks begin…

The 100-minute play morphs into a sequence of flashbacks, aided enchantingly by Jian Jung’s shape-shifting set pieces and Masha Tsimring’s ominous lighting. Jung and Tsmring combine their crafts to create an atmosphere penetrated by a deliberate emptiness. An Art Deco restaurant swiftly deteriorates into a dark void. Koogler’s backwards shape leads us through a series of vignettes: Mina and Ben’s waiter (a stoic Hampton Fluker) preparing for his first shift, the restaurant servers (a comedic duo of Jess Barbagallo and Carmen M. Herlihy) cherishing their luck of getting to work at a trendy establishment, and the rags-to-riches (and back to rags?) story of the Vagrant (a zestful Erin Markey). Stephanie Berry makes a fabulous appearance as well. Note: These are very literal descriptions of very absurd scenes. Green tightly directs the terrific ensemble, ensuring all of the actors exist within the same play. Well, sort of… You’ll have to see for yourself.

Watching Staff Meal is the equivalent of trying something new on a menu. Betraying your go-to and opting instead for a dish made of ingredients you can’t pronounce and spices you know are “fancy” but have no clue why. The flavor is difficult to describe and the texture is different from anything you’ve taken a bite of before. You may love it or you may hate it, but you’ll have a reaction nonetheless. Even Koogler himself says, “Whatever you think about when you watch the play, that’s good.”

For me, Staff Meal is a love letter to the theatre. Specifically, the act of sharing a gift. Not the materialistic or tangible kind of gift, but the homemade, arts-and-crafts one. A group of people working hard to piece something together and then give it away - whether into the pockets of a wealthy producer or forced away by a global health crisis. The gift isn’t what the recipient - or audience - holds in their hands, it’s the way it makes them feel. There is a very delicate manner in how Koogler dramatizes this selfless act of preparing something for another person and expecting nothing in return. An “Act of Service” are how his characters refer to it. “Our power, our glory increases only so much as we give it away, constantly. Only so much as we serve.” This Act of Service could be a meal, or a play, or simply offering to walk someone home while the world crumbles. Underneath the bizarre language and funky theatrics (I don’t mean this negatively - Koogler’s use of bells and whistles is not without intention), Staff Meal feels like a hug to the artists who watched their industry - their livelihood - be swept away like an unfinished meal.

We visit the theatre to listen to other people’s stories and to find answers. It’s a place of refuge that distracts us from our daily stressors, even if the story is troubling itself. We hope that if we offer two hours of our time, we’ll in turn receive the sense of clarity or peace that we’ve been craving. Instead, Staff Meal holds a mirror up to its audience. Koogler isn’t interested in closure or clarity. I’d say he’s much more concerned with the fragility of a society built on capitalism and the speed at which the things we love can be taken away. And his play is all the more sincere for this pursuit. In the finale, Ben says, “The world seemed sweet when we met” and Mina adds: “And now it’s now it’s”… Ben finishes, “Turned”.

Review: ‘The Seven Year Disappear’