PRELUDE FESTIVAL
CUNY Graduate Center
October 2018
Curing conversations, cutting recipes, and carving stories, Culinary Theater has built a new sandwich, the “Loislaida.” It tastes of three distinct Lower East Sides, pressing together Puerto Rican, Chinese, and Jewish tastes into the “perfect” (?) sandwich bite. Lunch Liturgy is the unmaking of that sandwich as performance. In this slice of lunch theater, we invite you to taste, to talk, to think, to be startled, and to imbibe together in a ritual meal that uses the fixings of sandwich and their pleas for audience to explore the veins of a neighborhood whole, the parallel networks which don’t always percolate distinctly on the maps we’re used to.
Hungry ethnographers, working to keep our appetites transparent and their caloric costs on the table, we offer up an honest sandwich in all its acids, bases, and frustrating commutes. Where do you taste yourself in this “slaida”?
Conceived by: Ben Gassman & Brandon Woolf
Chief Chef: Bob Garbarino
Performed by:
Bob Garbarino – Chef
Ben Gassman – Server
Kevin Horne – Server
Brandon Woolf – Maître B’
Ministers of Sandwich in Voice Over:
Admiral Saint Grey
Zoë Geltman
Ariel Elias
Meeko Gattuso
Special Thanks to:
Michele Rodriguez, Yue Zhao, José Sierra, Violet Yao, and everybody at the 189 Allen Senior Center; Alison Fleminger, Baba Israel, and the University Settlement Performance Project; Great NY Noodletown and El Castillo de Jagua.
Though Guss is gone
From Essex Street
And tourists flock
For non-Kosher meats
In barrels cured
Their elbows deep
Still mixing holy brine
Six days a week
The Pickle Guys
1-888-4-PICKLE
