The Catamounts’ latest production pairs food and drink with acting and music — what more could one ask for?
Set in the Carsten Theatre black box at Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center, The Catamount bills its latest FEED: Dry production as “Handcrafted: Food, drink and performance intended to explore the concepts of temperance, abstinence, hedonism and moderation.”
Director Joan Bruemmer-Holden takes her inspiration from the tradition of “Drynuary” —abstention from alcohol after a period of holiday excess, prompting the audience to consider how one balances our desire for pleasure with the need for discipline and control.
Bill Kopper and Nika Garcia provide the music for ‘FEED: Dry.
The experience includes a four-course meal, each with a craft cocktail (non-alcoholic or spiked with a locally sourced spirit) and a dish deliberately chosen to align with one of the four topics simultaneously explored through music and performance. The show features original pieces by Colorado playwrights Chelsea Frye and Ellen K. Graham as well as work curated by Bruemmer-Holden from the poetry of Rumi, a Brazilian boss nova, and the open-source plays of Charles Mee. We are escorted through the evening by the beautiful vocals of Nika Garcia with Bill Kopper on guitar performing covers of familiar, well-placed tunes as well as other pieces less known. The food and drink is locally sourced, and thoughtfully served.
The space is designed to foster a communal experience at all levels. Four eight-top tables, neat yet sparsely set, are diagonally placed surrounding the center performance area. The lighting is theatrical yet bright enough that every seated guest can see every other table (and patron) in the space. Guests at each table share their entire experience: food, drink, music and performance with naturally occurring rests in between scenes and courses.
Actors circle
The actors appear in a relatively small circle in the midst of the diners, modestly delineated by a jute circle on the floor with an outline of sand and dried grass arrangements alongside. The performers, who double as the waitstaff along with the artistic team, drift in and out of the center area in character. They cross over into the eating spaces, at times speaking directly to the diners.
The three performers – Jason Maxwell, Maggie Tisdale and Simone St. John – appear modestly dressed in earth tones similar to the scenery. But there is nothing basic about their presentation. Each of the actors in turn fills the relatively small performance space fully with their words and their presence, exploring the texts rich on each topic and drawing the audience even closer than the mere feet (or even inches) between them and the actors. Throughout every aspect of the production, there are no boundaries between audience and performer, fostering the overall sense for the audience being part of the production while simultaneously experiencing it first-hand.
FEED: Dry is by no means your average dinner theatre. Rather, the immersion as patron and participant into the pairings of food, drink, sound and speech offers a truly unique and highly pleasurable theatrical evening well worth experiencing.
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