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Staff Meal Deserves Five Stars on Yelp


A play about restaurant-making that’s likely to resonate with any underpaid, overwhelmed, hyperpassionate, exhausted creator.

Both involve a lot of unpaid or underpaid labor; weird schedules and too much alcohol; collaboration and vision; playfulness and rigor; a commitment to excellence and a belief, despite all the bullshit, in transcendence. In the small Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Jung has constructed an ambitious set of interlocking, sliding walls that shape and reshape the space, slicing it into hard angles and, the further the play goes, swallowing both locations and people into pockets of darkness. Without recourse to literalism, Koogler conjures the quintessence of 2020 — the absurdity and fragility, the aimlessness and mental rabbit holes, waiting and grief, the forgetting how to talk to other people, listening to yourself and thinking I sound like an alien in a person suit.

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