Editor's Note
By Jim O'Quinn
Assign yourself the task of creating "The Food Issue" of a theatre magazine, and a strange thing happens. Everywhere you look, these two distinctly separate realms—one encompassing bodily nourishment, human sustenance, gastronomy, cuisine; the other comprising performing-arts endeavors of every imaginable sort—appear to be mingling. Suddenly food and theatre seem more closely akin than you'd ever imagined. Not only do you realize how frequently the first has been employed as a key element in the latter—our special section tallies up a wide array of plays and performances in which food (being cooked, consumed, flung about or longed for) is crucially featured—but the art of theatre itself gains resonance and import (a richer flavor, if you will) from contemplating the juxtaposition.
So put your antennae out for food-and-theatre mash-ups—they won't be hard to run across. And just for fun, reverse your perspective: Rather than speculating on just what the injection of food into a performance might signify (Is there redemption in those armloads of vegetables in Buried Child? Why are Glengarry Glen Ross's wheeler-dealers eating egg foo yung?), think about the inherent theatricality of food—the performative nature of its production and distribution, the drama of its global abundance or lack thereof, the infinitely diverse variations involved in its preparation, presentation and consumption.
My own best recollections of food-as-performance come from the years I lived, along with 17 or so other adults and 4 children, at Marengo Street Commune in uptown New Orleans. It was the mid-'70s, and rather than adhering to some organizing principle or philosophy, our working-class commune, which occupied a pair of rambling Victorian houses, coalesced around a long oak table (formerly used, the story went, by the board of United Fruit Company) for evening meals together, seven days a week. One of Marengo's only rules was food detail: Once a week you either cooked the group meal (the creative option) or tidied up after it (not likely). So, for more than four years, I cooked weekly dinners for 20-plus people—dinners consumed at lively gatherings where poems were read, stories were told, birthdays were celebrated, arguments bristled and friendships waxed and waned.
Moments from this communal theatre—for that's surely what it was—can be conjured up in memory, vivid as a photograph, pungent as a freshly recollected dream, by certain foods I learned to prepare in those days and still whip up (in considerably reduced volume) from time to time: stewed okra and tomatoes, seasoned with bacon; chicken and dumplings, modeled after the Deep South version of the dish my grandmother made; Creole red beans and smoked sausage, hot with cayenne.
Here's my recipe—one of many in the print version of this issue, including tear-and-keep instructions for eight dishes with serious theatrical pedigrees—for my favorite of those Marengo dinners, red beans and rice.
Ingredients:
1 pkg. dried red kidney beans
1 lbs. andouille sausage
(pre-cooked) or smoked
sausage, sliced
2 tbsp. cooking oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
4 cloves garlic, sliced
Salt, cayenne and black pepper, bay leaves, thyme, to taste
Instructions:
Soak beans overnight, or bring to a boil in saucepan and set aside for 1 hour. Heat oil in skillet; sauté onions and bell pepper for 5 minutes. Add spices and sausage; sauté for another 5 minutes. Add mixture and garlic to beans with enough water to fully cover contents. Bring to boil; reduce heat and simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, for about 3 hours. When beans soften, use a spoon to mash a cup or so of them against side of pot. Add water if mixture becomes too dry/thick. Serve over rice.
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