Set inside the intimate 50-seat Sgouros Theatre, part of the historic Players Theatre in the heart of Greenwich Village, Masticate immediately places the audience close to the action.
Presented by Out of Order, a collective devoted to stories that make your jaw drop, the production uses the theater’s closeness to pull viewers into its volatile restaurant world.
Madison Fargo wrote Masticate, plunging audiences into a chaotic restaurant that becomes a pressure cooker of loneliness, rage, and desire. Fargo is a co-founder of Out of Order and a New York City–based writer, producer, and filmmaker. As pressures mount and tensions build in the play, chaos follows.
Isabel Bustamante brings Joni to life. An Equity actor, singer, dancer, and director, Bustamante portrays Joni as the stereotypical actor using waitressing as a stopgap while waiting for auditions. Perhaps because Joni is not fully committed to the job, she becomes the “older sister” to the others, offering both drugs and advice.
Khalil Crawford, a Brooklyn-based actor, plays Louis, the “intellectual” among the workers. Crawford captures Louis’s frustration with what he sees as the end of intellectualism. Early in the story, Louis quits his job, determined to go into the woods and become a survivalist. We later learn how successful he is.
Maya is the wild card, the source of chaos that turns the restaurant upside down. Maya Claridge, a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts who studied conservatory acting at the William Esper Studio, portrays a woman who tries to be devout but easily gives in to sin.
Christopher DeSantis portrays Brandon, the cook. DeSantis has performed in the Exponential Festival, at Columbia University, and with Theater in Asylum. Brandon moves from the back of the house into the dining area, interacting with both the waitresses and the customers. DeSantis presents him as a man driven by lust and ambition.
Olivia Murphy, a singer-actress, has performed at venues including the Perelman Performing Arts Center, 54 Below, Green Room 42, and Shakespeare in the Park. She plays Kimberly, a waitress drawn to tarot cards, visions, and Brandon.
Matthew Hays, a New York City–based actor, producer, and co-founder of the Out of Order collective, brings Tom, the owner and chef, to life. Tom is a hothead who does not discriminate: he yells at waitresses and at a customer who makes one of them cry. He is devoted to his pregnant wife, yet he readily has sex with Maya. Hays makes this complicated character believable.
Jenna Janet comes to Masticate from Off-Off-Broadway. She plays Rachel, Tom’s very pregnant wife, a woman who doubts the wisdom of bringing a child into a world she sees falling apart. When Rachel discovers that Tom has been unfaithful with Maya, she responds with cold rationality. Rather than firing Maya, she keeps her on as a waitress because the dining room is crowded with customers.
In Masticate, Madison Fargo transforms the food-service industry into sharply observed dark comedy. She does not have to exaggerate the friction between servers and customers; from a diner asking why dairy cannot be removed from cheesecake to the familiar demands placed on waitstaff, the play captures frustrations anyone who has worked in a restaurant will recognize. Fargo also confronts the sexual harassment waitresses endure and shows how quickly a restaurant can become a pressure cooker. She vividly conveys the strain of working in a restaurant during a heat wave, when the air conditioning fails just as the ice machine breaks down. The rising chaos feels like a natural extension of the world she creates, making this ninety-minute show both outrageous and grounded in reality.
