Berkeley Rep serves up a play about food and death
Food. I like to think about it, I like to talk about it, I like to cook it, I like to stuff it in my face. That’s one reason I enjoyed the world premiere of Julia Cho’s food-centric Aubergine at Berkeley Rep. Another reason is the play’s delicate exploration of a far more serious theme: a son’s relationship with his father as the father nears the end of life, when there’s not much time left to “work on the relationship,” as current jargon might put it.
Nonetheless the son works hard at the task. What’s his trump card? A bowl of soup.
Elegantly produced by Berkeley Rep’s artistic team, headed by the play’s director Tony Taccone, Aubergine begins with a lone woman named Diane, cross-legged on the floor, hand-cleaning a set of drinking glasses. Chatting with us, she confides that she and her husband are well-off, which has allowed them to do what they love most: eat at top restaurants the world over (she name-drops Catalonia’s reknowned El Bulli). They’re not just diners, they’re foodies.
When she strolls off, we find ourselves in a hospital, where we meet a distraught 30-ish Korean man, Ray, alongside his aged father lying in a hospital bed. Deeply sleeping and virtually immobile, the father is dying, and when Ray is advised to take him home under hospice care until the inevitable end, he acquiesces.
Most of the rest of the play takes place in that home, except for scenes in a restaurant. Why a restaurant? Because Ray is a talented chef, though his tough bird of a father has never acknowledged that talent. The best he ever managed to say about Ray’s food was, “Interesting…”
Can Ray forge a closer bond with Dad before the last breath leaves him?
Ray’s allies are a quietly wise, lilting-voiced hospice worker named Lucien, who made me wish he were more than a character in a play, so I could call him when my time rolls around; Ray’s uncle, who flies in from Korea when he learns his brother is ill; and Ray’s sometime girl friend, Cornelia, who reconnects with him when he asks her to translate the uncle’s Korean to English.
The play is relaxed in its unfolding, and I liked its gentle confidence. Never are we poked or prodded for a response. Of course an aubergine – an eggplant – shows up, wearing its smooth purple gloss. It arrives in Ray’s kitchen, where he works to prepare the perfect bowl of soup that may please his father and resolve the son’s need for approval.
The play makes much of how the taste of food triggers feelings, memories, reminding us how essential it is in the texture of our lives.
Director Taccone is aided by a top artistic team – Wilson Chin (set), Linda Cho (costumes), Jiyoun Chang (lighting), Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen (sound), and Aaron Rhyne (production design) – and the cast has talent and charm: Tim Kang as Ray, Sab Shimono as the father, Jennifer Lim as Cornelia, Tyrone Mitchell Henderson as Lucien, Joseph Steven Yang as the uncle, Jennifer McGeorge as a hospital worker, and Safiya Fredericks as Diane.
Speaking of Diane, what happened to her, who chatted so engagingly with us about food in scene one, then went MIA? She’s still around, it turns out, keeping a restaurant reservation in the final scene of the play, which provides it with a beautifully rounded conclusion.
Yum yum.
—ROBERT HALL
Aubergine plays at the Rep’s newly refurbished thrust stage, renamed Peet’s Theatre, after Mr. Peet of Peet’s Coffee. until March 20th. Macbeth, starring Conleth Hill and Frances McDormand, opens in the Roda Theatre this month. For tickets/information call 647-2949 or visit berkeleyrep.org.