Culinary Theater is a neighborhood-food-based performance collaboration between the playwright Ben Gassman and the director Brandon Woolf. Dinner theater meets Carolee Schneemann. Rachel Ray meets Rirkrit Tiravanija. We are interested in the culinary as a method and medium of exchange – political and artistic. Bertolt Brecht used “culinary” to mark the ways our lives and traditions have been packaged – and plastic wrapped – for easy consumption and digestion: TV dinner at the theater. In our work together since 2015, we have been working to re-ironize the “culinary,” with a return to “slow food”: ritual, hearty conversation, celebration, and the loud chewing of ideas. Working between social service organizations and more traditional art and performance venues, Culinary Theater uses food as a theatrical medium to investigate the ways communities are experienced, cherished, and potentially flattened – both historically and in the present day.
