What comes between the words is often where the magic can happen on a stage. With a new play like Theresa Rebeck's Seared, the audience can't tell where the playwright's work ends and the contributions of the actors and the director begin. But the fusion on view at San Francisco Playhouse, where the commissioned play is having its world premiere, falls somewhere between wonderful and brilliant.
The dramatic stakes, at least for those outside the specific world of the play, may seem rather small. You'll hear a lot about scallops, whether or not the available bivalves meet a chef's standards, or whether farm-raised salmon sufficiently approaches the taste of the wild kind for a boutique restaurant's menu. You may even get a whiff of the ingredients that are grilled on a working stovetop on Bill English's uncanny replication of a restaurant kitchen. But emotions become explosive and issues transcend the fussy culinary backdrop.
The words that Rebeck has put in the characters' mouths can find the luminous in the mundane, and they glow even more in director Margarett Perry's production that is filled with pauses, gestures, movements, and subtle inflections provided by a cast that seems intuitively at one with the material. It's not really a question of who created what, or how the pieces are so flawlessly mitered, for it is a unified invention by the time it reaches the audience.
The kitchen of a small, trending Brooklyn restaurant is where the action happens, and a crisis unfolds in the play's opening moments. A diner wants the scallop dish, an entree that has gotten a best-bets tout in New York magazine, but the chef has decreed no more scallops on the menu (actually on the chalkboard) until titular ingredients of a better quality show up at the fish market. The restaurant is just showing promise at becoming a profitable enterprise, argues Mike, the financial half of a partnership with Harry, a chef so enamored of his food that he grows uneasy when outsiders actually want it too much.
Variations on this battle accelerate as issues grow beyond the fate of a single restaurant into existential realms �" while never ignoring such wonders as how many ways asparagus can soar starting with just a butter base. By the time Mike hires a consultant to help promote the restaurant, we know there will be seismic reactions from the no-help-needed Harry. The sleek Emily even has the audacity to inaugurate a printed menu. Amidst all the sturm und drang, the restaurant's sole waiter strives for outward neutrality, although he is far from unopinionated in ways that find expression in often humorous ways.
While Chef Harry saves a sentimental place in his kitchen for an old toaster-oven, he himself is nuclear armed, and with a hair trigger. Brian Dykstra swoops into this role with eye-popping veracity, showing us a personality that is variously openly aggressive, sulkily passive-aggressive, and fragile. Rod Gnapp creates a perfect counterpart as the business half of the partnership whose pressure-cooked frustrations finally explode. As the waiter, Larry Powell delivers morsel after morsel of takes and deliveries that thrive on understatement. The role of the corporate-speak consultant is more of a device than the other characters, but Alex Sunderhaus drives it in high gear.
Perry's direction is well-considered from the choreographed discordance of characters slamming conversations into one another to the simple brief tableaus of characters in thoughtful repose during scene changes. Seared is main course all the way, with no desserts offered. The chef doesn't allow it, nor do we crave it. Satisfaction is so complete that you'd think the scallops had been available all along.
Seared will run at San Francisco Playhouse through Nov. 12. Tickets are $20-$125. Call (415) 677-9596 or go to sfplayhouse.org.