Dinner with Demons
Description
Jonathan Reynolds whips up an entire meal onstage while spinning funny and touching anecdotes about his parents, his jet-setting uncle, and his famous movie star cousin. The play explores everything from the role of food at the family dinner table to the eternal connection between food and seduction — a piquant mélange of performance, cookery and storytelling that can literally be described as “mouthwatering.”
Production Info
Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Press Quotes
“A spectacular, delicious, and perfect experience. DINNER WITH DEMONS is the best thing I have seen all year, and it is late in December. It was perfect. I want to get a pair of tickets for my mother-in-law. It was a perfect evening of theater. It was perfectly performed, the set was gorgeous, everything about it was magical.” —Mario Batali
“The recipe for a cooking show seems to be personal reminiscences induced by cooking, and philosophy induced by autobiography. So we have Jonathan Reynolds, playwright and culinary columnist, combining his two skills into DINNER WITH DEMONS, a dazzling display of cookery with polished palaver that is mostly witty or, at the very least, cute. For me, as a kitchen-illiterate, the array of fancy dishes dexterously prepared is breathtaking, and the reminiscing no less savory: dusted with the surreal, spiced with the apocryphal, but crisp or bittersweet or mellow to match the food it garnishes. The main characters are a domineering and resented mother, nicknamed the Warden; a divorced, remote, superrich, Don Juan–esque father; and dapper, civilized, always helpful Uncle Bus. Also a rogue’s gallery of Mother’s satanic associates, and Bus’s angelically irresistible daughter, Lee Remick: ‘I fell in love with her the way most people who met her did — at first sight, passionately, and like a sheepdog.’ This when Jonathan was three, and Lee nine. The reason for the show’s title is that ‘if you can’t exorcise your demons, you might as well have ’em over for dinner.’ Some of these demons are long dead, some of them malevolent, but all coming to the scrumptious and memorious meal Jonathan is cooking up as he talks smoothly, manipulates food like a prestidigitator, and exudes the Reynolds charm.” —John Simon, New York Magazine
Author
Jonathan ReynoldsAll ten of Jonathan Reynolds's plays have been produced in New York, most recently DINNER WITH DEMONS, an autobiographical one-man show in which he prepared a full five-course meal onstage eight times a week. Other notable plays include the controversial STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE, which the Pulitzer Drama Jury recommended for the award; GENIUSES, produced by Playwrights Horizons and which ran for a year Off-Broadway; and the first plays he wrote, a pair of one-acts, YANKS 3 DETROIT O TOP OF THE 7TH and RUBBERS at The American Place. Less notable plays include FIGHTING INTERNATIONAL FAT, also produced at Playwrights Horizons, AND TUNNEL FEVER OR THE SHEEP IS OUT, also produced at The American Place. Although five of his screenplays have also been produced, most notably Micki & Maude and My Stepmother is an Alien, his most memorable experiences in filmmaking have been with Apocalypse Now and Leonard Part 6, both of which could have gone either way. He is the recipient of Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundation grants as well as The Dramatists Guild Flora Roberts Award for Sustained Achievement. For five years, he was Treasurer of The Dramatists Guild of America, and for six years wrote a bi-weekly food column for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. His memoir, Wrestling With Gravy: A Life, with Food, was recently published by Random House, and his next play GIRLS IN TROUBLE was produced at The Flea Theatre in New York in February 2010. He passed away in November 2021 and was survived by his wife, the set designer and producer, Heidi Ettinger, along with two sons from his previous marriage and three stepsons.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 10/1/2005 |
| Pages | 72 |
| ISBN | 9780881452563 |
Special Notes
Originally produced by Second Stage Theater, New York
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypublishing.com