Tag Archives: Erin Brindley

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Cafe Nordo Revisits The Modern American Chicken

 

The cast of Cafe Nordo’s The Modern American Chicken

Café Nordo is back with a return to its origins. Four years ago, Terry Podgorski and Erin Brindley’s first pop-up restaurant took a stab at a different kind of theatre and a different kind of dining. The success of The Modern American Chicken led to a string of productions melding food with theatre, inlaid with a preaching-to-the-choir didacticism.

While later iterations of the café have struggled to achieve a dramatic arc, this first script has no such problems because it has no such aspirations, to either drama or didacticism. What drama one finds in this production is delivered by individual storytellers, or rather essayists. These essayists aren’t fixated on preaching the anti-Monsanto gospel. They come to praise, instead. There is a vague attempt at making a chicken archetype (dubbed Henrietta) into an anthropomorphized protagonist. Thankfully, this unprofitable strain is overwhelmed by gorgeous prose, placing the chicken at the center of the human universe, or at least the Western European culinary universe.

Podgorski’s set design reinforces this notion with tables arranged in rays around a yolk of a central table with a corona of light around its shadow on the floor. Shadow screens surround the loges of Washington Hall’s main performance space, set off by jagged structures that could be tree limbs or veins on a yolk. The lecture format is highlighted by a prominent lectern.

The acting is as lush as ever with the familiar cast including Opal Peachy, Maximilien Davis, and Carter Rodriguez. Peachy and Davis do the heavy lifting in the essay declamation department, while the rest have the more challenging and intimate role of providing table service in character. The servers all claim names of chicken breeds such as Andalusian and Wyandotte.

The whole cast joins in for Annastasia Workman’s musical numbers. Becky Poole, as Silkie Bantam, is the stand-out on these, with her musical saw on the bluegrass flavored Hot Little Bird. As Andalusio, Carter Rodriguez brings the heat with his electric guitar licks on songs including Homage to Henrietta.

Sadly, the heat was lacking from the food at a recent performance. Whereas most Nordo evenings have featured well-meaning but lackluster theatre performed with excellent and adventurous food, this performance was accompanied by key dishes served lukewarm that would have been nicer hot. The roasted chicken soup with chopped liver dumpling and wild seasonal mushrooms was tasty, but on the cool side. A roasted chicken with house-made sumac chicken sausage and habanero cherries was less than sufficiently hot, and seemed a bit undercooked.

A chilled parsley shot with savory lemon curd and crème fraîche was more in line with Nordo standards. The highlight of the meal was a spinach salad with poached egg served on a shredded parmesan and phyllo nest with goat cheese béchamel, served in an egg shell. This assemblage of textures and flavors was perfection. The accompanying wines were also excellent, though a final dessert wine came at an extra charge and Nordo does not do extra charges well (including cash-only tips); payment was slow and laborious.

It wouldn’t be Nordo without a dish with a theatrical twist in the plating. This time, the prize goes to a Theo Chocolate panna cotta with marionberry coulis, made to resemble chicken livers on a plate splattered with blood. The disconnection of the ghoulish visuals and rich, sweet flavors made for a suitably spooky end to a mid-October evening.

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Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Tough Guys and Oxtail Chili at Café Nordo’s “Smoked!”

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It’s time, once again, for another evening of fine dining and pleasant performance from Café Nordo. This peripatetic food theatre company integrates menu and plot and this time around they frame their agitprop performance in the world of the spaghetti Western with Smoked! (through June 16; tickets). It’s a fitting genre for Terry Podgorski’s often-ripe dialogue; thankfully, the cuisine one encounters is a far cry from the frontier.

For this Old West story, Café Nordo sets up shop in Pioneer Square at The Kitchen, Delicatus’s event space. There’s a Zane Grey feel to the space with lots of rough, unfinished wood, bat wing doors from the foyer, and a bulky bar backed by a long line of identical anonymous bottles of caramel-colored drink. A Palouse-like image is visible above those bottles. In one of the finer touches in this event the rolling hills shift from late afternoon to early evening over the course of the show.

As with all Café Nordo performances Smoked! features a plot that preaches to the choir against the evils of agribusiness. This doesn’t reveal anything new about spaghetti Westerns or agribusiness, but it’s a good time. We come to care about the characters and their fates more than the issues with which they wrestle.

Those characters include Clara (Café Nordo regular Opal Peachey), the saloon keeper who tries to keep her town together and her friends from harm. Peachey is joined by fellow alumni Maximillian Davis and Evan Masher. In the roles of Eli and Travis they give us the sort of vulnerable, simple men who populate this genre to contrast with the Clint Eastwood characters.

That gunslinger for good in is played here by Seattle’s go-to tough-guy actor, Ray Tagavilla. This nameless stranger looking for a drink and a hot bath quickly becomes embroiled with the town boss’s stooges The Advocate and “Mad Dog” Maddie (Ryan Higgins and Kate Hess). These villains are two sides of madness, one cold, controlled, and calculating, the other violent and unstable. The cast of capable actors rounds out with the obligatory sheriff and bar maids and, the most important character, the food itself.

Transitioning from the play to the food is the biggest dramaturgical challenge in Café Nordo shows. Director Erin Brindley and writer Podgorski are getting better at meeting that challenge but they have yet to master it. Where other shows might have a blackout between scenes, at Café Nordo, the audience gets a series of intermissions. During each break, the cast presents a course and its optional cocktail accompaniment (one may alternatively or additionally purchase drinks from a menu). Since the actors serve in character, the show must establish the audience’s role in the plot and a reason for the characters to serve us.

In Smoked! the audience has come to town to see a hanging that our protagonists are determined to stop. They don’t seem to mind our presence or purpose all that much but they don’t have a reason to serve us either. For the first course we are fed because it’s Maddie’s whim and she has a loaded gun. The later reasons are only a little more natural.

Overall the food outshines the acting and text. The third course, a sunflower seed risotto with garlic scape pesto, is the weak link in the cuisine and even that is pretty good. The loose biscuit of sunflower seeds (not risotto, but what else would one call it?) overwhelms the other flavors without obliterating them. The accompanying whiskey sour balances this nicely.

The final two courses and the final two scenes make up for any weaknesses in the rest of the evening. The oxtail chili is more like an oxtail soup that’s more meat than broth. It’s flavorfully spicy and awfully good. The fried corn pudding melts into it. The vegetarian chili is spicier than the meat with prominent celery. Relief from the heat comes in a dark, serious cocktail of rye, Fernet, and orange bitters.

When the shooting’s done (as it must be) tiny skillets appear on the tables as dishes for rhubarb pandowdy. When combined with fennel whipped cream it makes for a dessert that’s mildly sweet accompanied by a mildly bitter fortified tea. It’s a course that’s over too soon no matter how slowly one savors it.

Anastasia Workman provides the show with her reliably fine compositions that meet the genre while maintaining her personality. However the underscoring is a real highlight, notably in the early scenes, and some later flute work. Most of this features Dayton Allemann who is also responsible for the excellent video work.

K.D. Schill’s costuming is hit and miss. Some pieces look lived in and appropriately distressed but most of the costumes look fresh off the shelf including cartridge belts that have never held bullets. Some skirt hems fall awkwardly and there’s a bolero jacket and corset combination that doesn’t really work as worn.

Podgorski’s dialogue is often stiff and overwrought, which could be used to great effect in this setting but Smoked! aims more toward serious theatre than simply a genre spoof. Still he continues to show signs of growth as a writer with some genuinely funny and original scenes and a complete and well-structured plot. Between those laughs, the action of the later scenes, and the fine meal Café Nordo chalks up another accomplishment in their esoteric field.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Cafe Nordo’s Dinner Drama Returns, David-Lynch-Style

Once again Erin Brindley and Terry Podgorski are cooking up another round of culinary theatre with Café Nordo where palatable and performative pairings reinforce and inform one another with an aim to elevate food consciousness. This latest production, Somethin’ Burning (at Theatre Off Jackson through November 16: tickets), features as strong a drama as Nordo’s ever produced but the food remains the primary attraction.

When we last encountered Chef Nordo he took us on a funhouse tour of culinary history, traipsing from room to room and course to course at Washington Hall. Each space was renovated to stage and complement a different course.

This time the Nordo technical team has built rooms forming a series of airlocks that lead dining audiences from the damp streets of Seattle into an inner sanctum out of Twin Peaks. While Somethin’ Burning is advertised as “a Lynchian Fever Dream” no tiny chickens will bleed on your plate. Rather it’s a send-up of Twin Peaks through Chef Nordo’s tasty and didactic lens.

The dining room itself suggests a melding of Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge and RR Diner. A mishmash of tables and café chairs line a crisscrossed alley staging with a bar, a diner table setting, and bandstand meeting a corridor under an antler chandelier.

Composer Annastasia Workman employs that bandstand well. She eschews Angelo Badalamenti’s surrealist lounge music from the television series for a more pleasantly dark style on the hot side of swing. The off-kilter lyrics and low-key delivery are a touch sunnier than Andrew Bird in his Bowl of Fire incarnation. Evan Mosher is notable here on muted trumpet and supporting the singing waiter Ricky Valentine (Devin Bannon) on vocals. Jessica Trundy’s lights work as hard as Workman’s compositions in making the music a focal point of the evening.

The acting demonstrates a marked improvement in the Nordo oeuvre. Mosher, in the role of Agent Eliot Penn, is capable, though with his ever-present boyish smirk he comes off more Matthew Broderick than Kyle Maclachlan. Nordo regular Opal Peachey is the most grounded and genuine in a cast that can get away with high artifice in this unusual setting. MJ Seiber also demonstrates great commitment in his performance as Rocky Graves, one half of a Greek chorus of supernatural bikers.

The script is a strong achievement for the Nordo team. The plot has an arc and features some character development with everything tying into the food. There’s enough structure to create identifiable patterns setting expectations and both delivering on them and then varying those expectations to create interest. The audience experience ranges from reasonably amusing and eccentric to utterly hilarious depending on one’s familiarity with the source material.

Most impressive is the way that Nordo’s local/organic food philosophy integrates into the plot. It can get a bit ham-fisted, but it moves the action forward authentically so we accept the propaganda—not that anyone attending Café Nordo is opposed to that philosophy. Nordo is preaching to the choir and the choir doesn’t mind one bit.

Strong as the plot is with its slight touches of the bizarre the text drama is out-performed by the food. There isn’t a false note from the kitchen as Nordo pulls off another miracle of stage management. Every dish is consistently appropriate in temperature and balanced in flavor with exciting surprises from an everything bagel spiced cream cheese to bacon candy.

Aside from an opening cocktail nod to cherry pie the focus fixes on breakfast, but this is no late night at the pancake house. We still get a fine dining experience, just in the guise of breakfast. Some elements are fairly ambiguous (is there a right time for a savory parfait?) but the most overtly breakfast-styled dishes are breathtaking abstractions. An initial course of donuts and gravy goes far beyond steak and eggs in mixing temporal motifs. The donuts feel impossibly light on their own and balance perfectly in the meat gravy though they overwhelm the vegetarian gravy a bit.

The final dish takes the cake giving us dessert in breakfast form. What appears to be scrambled eggs with hash browns and bacon is made from vanilla custard, shredded apples and that bacon candy. The expectations of the visual and the experience in the mouth leave the senses reeling a bit.

The extra $10 for cocktails is a steal for a series of drinks that almost steal the show. The Cucumber Collins provides a nice balance to the dominant dark notes in the series. On an especially wet and chilly night a second Toddy O’Brandy might be required before you bus, bike or cab it home. Remember, Café Nordo still doesn’t include a gratuity, so bring some cash, they earn it.