Playwright's Perspective: Abe Koogler

I am fascinated by restaurants. I love reading about chefs and their philosophies. I love thinking about the aesthetics of restaurants, and their mechanics: the intricate rhythm of a group of people working together to make and serve meals. And then there’s the food itself—a great meal at a restaurant can be intellectually interesting and emotionally satisfying. It can trigger new feelings, memories, and fantasies. 

Staff Meal is a play about a restaurant. The play is also a small universe. It has its own cosmology. It contains rabbit holes, sudden eclipses and weather events, and long stairways down to other worlds. It has its own distinct rules and patterns. My hope is that you will emerge from it the way you might emerge from a transportive meal in an unusual restaurant in a part of town you’ve never been to before.

I started writing the first draft of Staff Meal in January 2020 and finished it in April 2020. This play is unavoidably shadowed by the pandemic. But it also contains many other images and impulses. When I wrote it, I was thinking about the way personal identity can shift radically over a lifetime. I was thinking about the empathetic leaps we are capable of as human beings, and if that can be squared with the theory that writers should stick close to their own experiences. I was thinking about meaningful work and how it can give shape to our lives. I was missing the spaces of New York City—the restaurants, bars, theaters, concert venues, coffee shops, and bookstores. I was thinking about the role of art in a time of crisis. I was thinking about what it feels like to lose people you love. I was imagining thousands of colored bottles in a wine cellar deep beneath the earth.

So that is my way of saying that this play is about a restaurant, but it is also about other things. My favorite art has that multiplicity of many threads interwoven. Whatever you think about when you watch the play, that’s good. If something new comes to you—a stray melody—a memory—a regret—an image—a feeling about what we’ve been through, or what’s coming next—a blank space—the edge of a world—if any of that comes to you, and if any of it sticks—after you leave the theater, or the next morning, or even days later—if something new is there, however small, and if that new thing leads to something else that’s new, however small—then, to me, based on where we are, and how stuck things can feel sometimes inside of us, even as the world changes so quickly—the play will have accomplished what it was after.