Feast: to live is to want more
12 Apr 2025 - Photos by Jae Yang

This Feast is a lot to digest. Playwright Guillermo Verdecchia (English, The Royale, Animal Farm, Flashing Lights, A Line in the Sand, The Art of Building a Bunker) has crafted an exquisitely detailed satire on consumerism, food porn, colonization, environmental collapse, forced migration, globalization and much more. All of it wrapped in our very human need to acquire experiences, objects and status. A character deadpans, "To live is to want more." Mark and Julia are an upper middle class couple, he a businessman who travels "buying and selling," she a successful lawyer. They appear happily married with Mark telling us that he travels with a family photo that he puts by his bedside in each successive hotel room. But they both want more. Mark, Rick Roberts (The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?, Cymbeline, Prodigal, Animal Farm, Prince Hamlet, An Enemy of the People), has found the world has homogenized and everywhere, no matter how supposedly exotic, has become the same. And the banana he eats for breakfast has lost its flavour. In Beirut he searches for a market "like the ones in an Amex ad" but settles for the familiar comfort of a Starbucks.

The barista explains a promotion for "geography is a flavour" by describing how the beans take on the taste of where they are grown. Mark sets out on a quest to experience the most obscure and foreign foods that he can find. The dishes he finds as he obsesses around the world are hilarious, disgusting and many consist of endangered species. He wants more. Julia, Tasmin Kelsey, has been planning a family vacation but the chosen resort town burns to the ground in a forest fire. And their house floods in a torrential rainstorm. Julia wants to feel safe and her efforts to do so grown more extreme and comical. She wants more. Their daughter Isabel, Veronica Hortiguela (Monks, The Bidding War, Prodigal, Every Little Nookie), a champion swimmer, wants to save the world and finds her parents' efforts at recycling and energy reduction inadequate. She wants more. Chukuemeka, Tawiah M'Carthy (Sankofa: The Soldier's Tale Retold, Here Lies Henry, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, Maanomaa My Brother, Obaaberima, Black Boys), a "fixer" who Mark meets in Kenya, is willing to help Mark find ever more outré and illegal dishes in exchange for the money to keep his daughters in a British boarding school. He wants more. 

The action takes place on a sparse set dominated by a series of sliding glass doors. Set and projection designer Kaitlin Hickey has designed a sumptuously functional minimalist world that, like Mark's observation, could be anywhere. That is except for one special effect that echoes one of the major metaphors in a dramatic fashion. The glass also reflects and refracts, echoing Mark's vision from a hotel window of his reflection, his soul, floating over the city and disappearing. Pin point lighting by Chris Malkowski isolates the characters within their rapacious desires, with the side effect of giving the proceedings a solemn and sombre tone that conflicts with the rapid-fire wit of the text. Director Soheil Parsa (Monster, The House of Bernarda Alba) moves the characters smoothly through their paces and coaxes initially naturalistic performances, grounding us in a reality that slowly grows more and more outrageous with an inexorable logic. The indispensable Thomas Ryder Payne not only scores but adds sonics to cue us for breaking of the fourth wall. The cast is miked in order to mimic phone conversations and also to reflect states of mind. It is initially disconcerting in a small a theatre as the Tarragon but slowly proves to be prescient. Distance has collapsed but we are still alienated.

The production sits uneasily on the line between comic satire and turgid agitprop. Verdecchia's script is full of comic lines that would have zinged at a faster pace and with less weighty emphasis. But then one might not be left with the aftertaste of rumination with a smidgen of guilt that this production induces. The themes and symbols are so tightly wound and expertly placed that the "aha" moments pass as logical occurrences, as illuminations without calling attention to themselves. A monologue on the Starbucks logo's origins leads to the differences between mermaids and sirens, to the daughter's sport of choice, to a final meal that, while inevitable in context, still horrifies. Roberts excels as an everyman who goes too far without losing our identification. Kelsey escalates scarily as the happy housewife with ambition becomes a frenzied prepper. She also has great fun as a creatively accented psychiatrist who casually notes that "many live without souls." Hortiguela is suitably impassioned and also gets a side gig as the earnest barista with a savoury exit line. Tawiah M'Carthy adds physical comedy details to his dubious procurer of delicacies. We know his bally is suspicious at best, but there is enough charm and aspiration to earn our empathy. Feast is, like the foods Mark consumes, both delicious and disturbing. Though the end of the world and how we deal with it is a heavy topic, if the dark comic relief spice had been given a few more ounces of emphasis, Feast would have left me wanting more instead of comfortably fed.