“Feast,” Guillermo Verdecchia’s new play now running at Tarragon Theatre, leaves you feeling a lot like its main character: stuffed, yet never completely satisfied.
An exploration of how greed can consume us, this bleak and sometimes dark social commentary is nonetheless a bold artistic work. You’d expect nothing less from Verdecchia, the Governor General’s Award-winning playwright known for breaking with theatrical form.
As he did in his seminal solo work “Fronteras Americanas,” Verdecchia manipulates both time and place in “Feast.” His chameleonic narrative is filmic in its sweep, changing perspectives on a dime. What begins as an ordinary domestic drama soon veers into the existential, then plunges into the dark abyss of the absurd.
Mark (Rick Roberts) lives a more-than-comfortable life that should be the envy of others. His wife, Julia (Tamsin Kelsey), is an accomplished lawyer, and they both have two adult kids. An avid jet-setter, Mark constantly travels the world for his consultancy work.
But a cloud of unhappiness hangs over the married couple. “Did you see how blue the sky was today?” Julia asks her husband early in the play. “Too blue.”
When Mark is on the road, he carries a photo of his family to keep himself grounded. “It’s the last thing I see when I fall asleep and the first thing I see when I wake up,” he says in one of his many soliloquies. “That way, even if I don’t know where I am, I’ll know who I am.”
Roberts delivers that line with such conviction, as if it’s his character’s personal credo. But it doesn’t last. When Mark loses that family portrait on one of his trips, he starts to unravel.
The emptiness to his existence grows even greater. Marks eats to fill that void. No just any food, but the most exotic items he can find from the region he’s in. “I could take the place into me,” he rationalizes. “I could weigh myself down with a place, anchor myself, keep myself from floating away.”
Mark’s adventures, however, come at a cost. The more he eats, the more of himself is slowly eaten away. It’s like he’s selling his soul in exchange for nourishment.
If this all makes you recall the classic legend of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and youth, Verdecchia is already several steps ahead of you. He directly references — then gently alludes to — Faust several times throughout “Feast.”
The play ultimately offers a searing look at how greed and excessive consumption can be destructive, both to ourselves and those around us.
In “Feast,” gluttony and compulsivity go hand in hand. When Mark abandons his family, they also spiral. Following a series of natural disasters, Julia slowly turns into a doomsday prepper. Meanwhile, Mark and Julia’s daughter, Isabel (Veronica Hortiguela), becomes an increasingly extremist climate crusader.
The central problem with “Feast” is that it’s overstuffed. Mark is the play’s most compelling character. An eat-the-rich side plot involving his Nigerian fixer, Archie (a blazing Tawiah M’Carthy), also makes from some meaty fodder. But the women characters, particularly Isabel, come across more like awkward, archetypical sketches.
This production, directed by Verdecchia’s close collaborator Soheil Parsa, moves at a blistering speed, scenes cutting to and fro with slick ease, thanks in large part to Chris Malkowski’s lighting and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound designs. Kaitlin Hickey’s set, comprised of several sliding glass doors on a bare stage, helps to facilitate these transitions.
But when “Feast” needs to decelerate at the end, to let Verdecchia’s themes come through, it instead races forward even faster, blurring the already thin narrative threads. And except for Mark, whose ending already seems all but certain barely halfway through the show, the other characters’ fates feel less satisfactory. That much could be said about “Feast” as a whole, an intense play that serves up a smorgasbord of ideas but few that have very much bite.
