Notes on STAFF MEAL
Abe Koogler first sent a draft of Staff Meal to Playwrights Horizons in the summer of 2020, which — as no one needs reminding — was a time of anxiety, isolation, violence, and loss at a scale that is still unfathomable. The streets were empty. Shops were boarded up. Restaurants and cafés were closing quietly, unceremoniously. We looked out our windows at a now-unfamiliar city, our memories of “before-times” compressed onto a zip file. I recall watching my oldest friends, pregnant with twins, loading their Toyota to drive north, and the dawning fear that I may never see them again.
Four years later, I randomly run into folks I used to spend time with regularly, stunned to realize I haven’t seen them since 2019. Other folks I haven’t seen at all; have they moved to another city? It’s as if the social pathway we once traveled, whatever activity it was that connected us, is no longer there. Who am I not randomly running into? Who have I simply forgotten? And what was it that made us once feel like a community — a community I took for granted.
On the same day that I stepped in as Artistic Director at Playwrights — July 1, 2020 — all but a few of the theaters’ staff members were placed on furlough. A lot of our staff, some who had worked here for decades, never returned. Both our theater on 42nd Street and our school in Astor Place were shut down, and, alongside a panic attack that lasted approximately until the following spring, was the very real possibility that we might never be able to put the pieces back together.
So it was in this, um, cheerful context that a first draft Staff Meal circulated among the artistic staff at Playwrights and invaded our collective brain. On Zoom screens, we geeked out. The play was unlike any other: a constant surprise, misbehaving and inverting itself, a cheeky punk, a fun house, a labyrinth. On first read, the play had no particular resonance with the way we were living mid-pandemic. (Abe wrote most of this play before the city shut down.) Its magnetism came from the curiosity of Abe’s writing, which turned us all into Alices tumbling through Wonderland. And from the ineffable way it evoked a sorely needed kind of comfort.
Later, sometime around the fall of 2021, when the city (and the theater) began to re-awaken — the beginning of “after-time” — the team at Playwrights was finally able to get into a rehearsal room with Abe and his play, to hear it read aloud by actors in our New Works Lab. We learned not only that Staff Meal was just as delightful off the page, but also that it spoke with uncanny precision to the heart of a new insecurity.
I recall imagining, from the middle of Covid isolation, what would happen when the pandemic was officially declared “over.” Naively thinking that this would be a clear and definitive moment, announced some sunny morning from news sources worldwide, I pictured all of my family and friends dancing together at, like, some awesome foam party, breathing all over each other’s faces and laughing about it. In reality, there was no ending, just the fuzzy disorientation of trying to resume a past life, in a city that was unfamiliar and a community that was now disparate.
Staff Meal, in its Escher-like narrative, and in its play-world that hovers somewhere between a Fritz Lang nightmare and a Buster Keaton routine, finds expression for an anxious era. An in-between time, when it seems — to me, anyway — like one world has ended and the next one (whatever it will be) hasn’t begun yet.
More than this, though, it’s a play that offers a life-line, a beacon through the fog. A few weeks after that reading in 2021, Abe sent Playwrights Horizons a one-page document titled, “Twelve Things I Know About Staff Meal.” I still have this page hanging on the bulletin board in my office, just to my left, which I find myself reading regularly still; it has come to mean a great deal to me. The third entry on Abe’s list reads:
“Staff Meal is not about the pandemic in any literal sense, but it does contain an ‘end of the world’ in which people are separated from each other and communal spaces disappear. The play asks how we hold onto beautiful things in the face of this ending. Like Ben and his dog*, can we care for each other when the world pulls us apart?”
(* This reference will be clear when you see the play.)
The anxiety of our age is logical. There are legitimate reasons to feel terrified and alienated. A war. Another war. Another war. Coronaviruses. TikTok. The Right. The Left. Climate. Artificial intelligence. Comment sections. Remote work. Inflation. Immigration. Streaming services. We all saw the world stop, and now we know it can. But we can keep moving, create the space to care for one another, and maybe share in a meal.