Comfort Food; written by Zorana Sadiq and directed by Mitchell Cushman, opened in the Studio at Crow’s theatre on Friday evening.  Itdescribes itself as an exploration of “the delicacy of familial love” told via the intersecting stories of Bette (Zorana Sadiq) and her teenage son  Kit  (Noah Grittani).  Bette is a single mother and the host of a TV cooking show that has seen better days.  Kit is a high school student who is trying to be a climate change activist (mostly virtually).

In an attempt to make her show more relevant, Bette invites Kit to join her as a guest talking about “sustainable” food.  On the face of it it’s a fiasco with Kit throwing dirt on the food, but ratings soar so Bette invites more, increasingly outlandish guests.  The food scientist responsible for particularly disgusting in vitro meat is just the start.  We proceed from there to the hippy parent; who believes in letting everything, including parenting, just happen, and the survivalist with a commercial line in axe-knives whose culinary skills don’t stretch beyong hacking carrots to bits.  The “guests” are all played by Grittani and these scenes are cleverly written and very funny.

Meanwhile Kit is being an angsty teenager.  He cuts classes.  He fails to organise a climate protest and has a love/hate relationship with a female classmate who has different views on how to do climate activism.  Meanwhile he’s flirting with increasingly dangerous territory on the internet; dark web, building (maybe) some kind of weird medieval Swedish projectile weapon and so on.  And, of course, he rows with his mother about everything and nothing.  Maybe we are supposed to find him particularly troubled but I just saw a perfectly normal teenager trying to learn to be a human and making mistakes along the way.  Nothing much else happens and it all ends rather anti-climactically.

All that said, here’s a lot to like. The writing is sharp.  The acting is good.  The stagecraft keeps things moving along.  The way Kit’s interactions on the web are presented is visually very effective.  And, not least, individual scenes are very funny and sometimes touching.  But… I came out of the theatre asking myself “what was that all about?”  And I can’t answer that question.  I certainly didn’t feel I’d acquired any new insight into “the delicacy of familial love”.  Hence the headline.

Comfort Food continues in the Studio at Crow’s until June 8th.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz