DEAR FRIENDS,

My snap description of The Big Meal has been to call it a "post modern The Dining Room." For those of you who have never seen or read this seminal 1981 play by A. R. Gurney, you need only know that the whole play takes place in a well appointed dining room where a cast of six assumes a variety of roles, all of which taken together depict the gradual slippage of American WASP culture. It's worth noting that when The Dining Room was first produced, several critics noted resemblances of that play to Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner, in which a family holiday dinner gradually shifts to future generations over the course of the play. Undoubtedly, students of criticism could find comparisons of Wilder to even earlier writers. Now, ex-Comp Lit majors like me love to make literary comparisons: not to reduce the achievement of something new, but to deepen our understanding of something, to locate it on the larger continuum of artistic achievement, and most of all to help identify what is unique and surprising about the new work.

In Dan LeFranc's world, the locus of American family life has long since left Wilder's and Gurney's rarely used dining rooms, replaced by a monochromatic array of interchangeable restaurant chains that give witness to the same broad spectrum of human drama as was once confined to the family home, or indeed the family dining room. There's another difference as well. Gurney's play creates a mosaic of many discrete scenes, each a small play in itself, unified by theme and theatricality. Dan's play depicts one family followed over four generations. (In this regard, it is more similar to Wilder's play). As the characters age, so do the actors who depict them, which is to say that each of the eight actors in The Big Meal play different members of this family at various stages in their lives. But this is not the only trick of time in The Big Meal. Time also keeps slipping forward right in the middle of scenes. The effect emphasizes how quickly momentous changes happen, often against our will or knowledge, and how long we hang onto our secrets and resentments before they come tumbling out, again so often seemingly against our will.

The greatness of Dan's play does not lie in its mechanics, however. Its greatness lies in its scope and vision, in the specificity of its observations and its compassionate, yet hawk-eyed humanity. It's a hugely theatrical, epic, yet intimate play, and the metaphoric resonances of its title evolve as we watch it. We start with the literal meaning. Many many meals transpire over the course of the play, each of them "big" for a variety of reasons. Such is the variety of these many "big meals" that, over time, we come to see the title as a metaphor for life itself. It makes complete sense to point to our corporeal essence as human animals by arranging all of the play's activities around mealtime. And all the functions of the body have their time in the play and rub up against this meal metaphor as well. Some of these moments devolve into hilarious chaos; others land with thunderous simplicity and solemnity. In the end, The Big Meal also comes to refer to the play itself. Dan spreads his story before us like a banquet and its theatricality entices us like a feast.

I've used as many tools of persuasion as I could muster in a short, one-page letter to trumpet my enthusiasm for The Big Meal, but I haven't tried hyperbole yet. Nor a quote. Let's try both in one. In an e-mail exchange with Annie Baker earlier this year, she said, "Can't wait to see this coming season's plays especially THE BIG MEAL WHICH IS THE GREATEST PLAY EVER WRITTEN." See, it's not just me who's excited to see this play. I hope you are now, too.My parents met while working together at a restaurant in the Midwest. My mom was a waitress, my dad a manager. It's a pretty simple love story, one that always seemed to me wholly unremarkable. But one day not so long ago I began to consider how many lives were affected by that chance encounter. Of course my parents' lives changed forever, but so did the lives of their parents, grandparents, siblings, friends—and above all, my sister's and mine. And it just keeps going from there. On and on and on. All because two people happened to meet in a restaurant.

--Tim Sanford, Artistic Director

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Perhaps because my parents both worked in the service industry, my most vivid memories of family take place around laminated menus and sampler platters. Like many Americans, we spent a lot of time going out to eat. I mean A LOT. So often, in fact, that many of these places came to feel like an extension of our living room. We laughed, cried, and fought like crazy for an audience of countless waiters and diners. My face still goes red at the thought of some of our more colorful performances, especially the ones that ended with our being asked to please leave the table. We were, suffice it to say, a very theatrical family.

Now I've written this play that takes place in a restaurant and tells the story of a big noisy family over the course of several generations, the inspiration for which I guess is fairly obvious. However, as is probably true of all art, the play is also an expression of what obsessed me over the period of time I wrote it -- the great joys and disappointments of my parents' marriages; the genetic time bombs set to detonate inside each of us; the wonderful and weird relationships I have with my siblings; how much I look like my dad; the dizzy bliss of falling in love; what happens to parents when their kids become parents; the way the familial pecking order shifts; family and friends who have fallen ill; how death brings countless lives to a halt; how my grandmother lights up when I finally come to visit; the way I've come to know and respect certain family members so much more since they've passed away; how terribly guilty I feel for not having made more time, for not having made it really count with each and every one of them.

And so I guess somewhere in all of that is The Big Meal. Everything I think I know about family and life up until this point, crammed into a little play. To paraphrase something John Steinbeck once wrote to a friend about his latest novel, "Nearly everything I have is in it, and still the box is not full."

--Dan LeFranc, December 2011

Photo by Jeff Prout

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SAM GOLD has collaborated with the playwrights Annie Baker, Will Eno, Bathsheba Doran, Dan LeFranc, Stephen Belber, Nick Jones, Beau Willimon, Noah Haidle, Sam Marks, Betty Shamieh, Zoe Kazan, Theresa Rebeck and others. Recent credits: Seminar (Broadway); We Live Here (Manhattan Theater Club); A Doll's House (Williamstown Theatre Festival); August: Osage County (Old Globe); Kin (Playwrights Horizons); The Coward (Lincoln Center's LCT3); Tigers be Still (Roundabout); Dusk Rings a Bell (Atlantic); The Aliens (Rattlestick); Circle Mirror Transformation (Playwrights Horizons, Drama Desk nomination, Obie Award in 2010 for Outstanding Direction of Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens); Jollyship the Whiz-Bang (Ars Nova and Under the Radar Festival); Rag and Bone (Rattlestick); The Joke (Studio Dante); and The Black Eyed (NYTW). Sam was the Dramaturg at The Wooster Group from 2003–2006. He is a Roundabout Associate Artist, NYTW Usual Suspect, Drama League Directing Fellow, recipient of the Princess Grace Award, The Garson Kanin/Marian Seldes Theater Hall of Fame Fellowship, a graduate of the Juilliard Directing Program, and a former Playwrights Horizons Directing Resident. Upcoming: Look Back in Anger (Roundabout); The Realistic Joneses (Yale Rep); Uncle Vanya (Soho Rep). Photo by Aaron Epstein.

During the run of The Big Meal post-performance discussions with Dan LeFranc and Sam Gold have been scheduled for the following dates:

- Friday, March 2
- Wednesday, March 7
- Sunday, March 18 following the matinee

These discussions are an important aspect of our play development process. We hope you can take part! Click HERE to log in and book your tickets.

DAVID WILSON BARNES BROADWAY: The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Becky Shaw (Drama Desk nom.) OFF-BROADWAY: All New People (Second Stage); Lady, Saint Crispin's Day (Rattlestick). Film: Capote, Taking Woodstock. TV: "30 Rock," "The Good Wife," "You Don't Know Jack."

TOM BLOOM
BROADWAY. Cyrano de Bergerac, Henry IV, The Rehearsal, Racing Demon. OFF-BROADWAY: Timon of Athens (Public), All's Well That Ends Well (TFANA), Jack's Precious Moment (Page 73). TV: "Law & Order," "Guiding Light," "As the World Turns." Film: The Green, The Dark Fields, In Praise of Shadows.

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? -- every, every minute?"
--Emily Webb, in Thornton Wilder's Our Town

Our permanently unresolved relationship to time is and always has been at the center of the human experience. Wilder reminds us in the masterful third act of Our Town that this relationship is at the center of any play as well, and that theater as a medium has the unique capability of wrestling with it. When we see a play, a room full of people (audience and artists) closely experience the phenomenon of human choice and action in shared time. It follows that among the most important features of a play is how time operates within it, and playwrights are fond of experimenting with speed, direction and duration to gain or provide new perspective.

The classic climactic tragedy (e.g., Oedipus, 429 BCE) focuses on the crucial few hours during which a lifetime of backstory leads to an inevitable, in-the-moment, life-altering reversal of fortune. In contrast, the episodic form (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, ca. 1590's) first popularized by the Elizabethans widens the scope of the action to days, months or years. The emphasis is taken off the exposition (all we need to know is that the Montagues hate the Capulets) and placed on the life choices made before our eyes. By expanding the timeline, the characters appear more in control of their destinies. When Romeo declares himself "fortune's fool," it resonates ironically -- we just saw him become this.

But a play's relationship to time doesn't only invite speculation about its characters' free will. In Kaufman and Hart's Merrily We Roll Along (1934, adapted by Sondheim in 1981), the story starts in the present and moves backwards into the past, its reverse chronology allowing characters' optimism at the end of the play (the beginning of the story) to resonate ominously with the disappointment we know is in store. In contrast, in Harold Pinter's Betrayal (1978), which also moves backwards in time, our complete knowledge from the beginning of who did what to whom shifts the play's focus from that 'what' to the 'how' and the 'why.'

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (1993) is one of many contemporary plays that alternates between two complementary but separate narratives, in this case one in the 19th century and one in the 20th. The accumulation of props from these alternating scenes across the central table-top appears random, seeming to confirm the 19th century hypothesis that the universe's natural state is entropy. But as audience members we see these props accumulate, granting us witness to the odd resonances between the present and the past, finding order in the apparent chaos.

Throwing rational chronology out the window in favor of a more Expressionist sensibility, John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1990) not only popularized its titular sense that the world is getting smaller, but employed a kind of time-logic that feels similarly compressed, slightly elliptical and characterized by surprising coincidences and juxtapositions in space and time, reflecting the compressed, heightened pace of life in the contemporary, smaller-seeming world.

Like Guare, and many other contemporary playwrights, Dan LeFranc is in search of how to harness time on stage, to reflect the way we feel it moving in the fast pace of modern life. But, like Wilder's work, The Big Meal manages to call attention to its quickness, inviting us to slow down and to do the seemingly impossible—to see it as it carries us along.

- Alec Strum, Associate Literary Manager

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In the spring of 2008, Dan LeFranc sat staring at me in the offices of Playwrights Horizons, wild-eyed in disbelief that I had never read—or even heard of, to be honest—Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, the eye-opening analysis not just of comics, but of all art-making. Because reading this book was an insight to the evolution of Dan's consistently innovative work, and because he practically kicked me down the street to buy a copy, it seems wholly appropriate to start a look at Dan's playwriting by pointing to some of the key ideas that McCloud so eloquently presents in comic-strip form, such as:



Comics, of course, run a pretty sizeable gamut, from the absurdist (Bill Kupperman's Snake n' Bacon) to the penetrating (Art Spiegelman's Maus) to the bad-ass (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen) to the lame (Bil Keane's Family Circus); and it's the comic writer's job to find the perfect physical Form to convey the Content he has set out to communicate. Substitute the word "theater" for the word "comic" in that last sentence, and you'll be standing, it seems to me, at a good vantage point to understand the adventurous trajectory of Dan LeFranc's writing. Each play is an exploration into the possibilities of form, an experiment in the philosophy of storytelling, as he pushes the shape of his plays around in a variety of directions to best house the characters and stories he offers up.

But in a LeFranc play, playing with form is never the result unto itself; each structure he innovates seems to evolve from inside the kernel of a play's originating impulse, from the mind-set of his characters. It's particularly appropriate to consider McCloud's awesome book in light of LeFranc's play Origin Story. Set somewhere in the American Midwest, in a town called Nowheresville, a troubled, vengeful kid has created a mysterious comic book with supernatural powers to turn highways into rivers and ordinary citizens into bloodthirsty octopuses, and causing a bizarre double-murder that has the whole community bewildered. Taking his cue from our story's hero, a confused adolescent comic book artist, Dan employs the dramaturgy of a comic book. The play's reality is malleable and plastic, constantly changing shape and whisking us back and forth through the story's timeline as it gradually becomes clear that what we have been watching are the pages of the mysterious comic book itself.

In his play Bruise Easy, a smart-ass teen and his angry sister are reunited when their mother has gone missing. Framed by a chorus of precocious neighborhood kids, this play is built like Greek tragedy, in which the estranged siblings are forced to confront the wounds inflicted by family. But infusing the play with an Expressionistic gesture, Dan theatricalizes their awakening, bending the laws of physics to reveal a frightening new vision of the suburban landscape around them. And Night Surf, his hilarious and insane beach-blanket Babylon, is a psychedelic spin on the Euripidean bacchanal, telling the story of a gang of sex-hungry surfer girls who declare a ban on boys for the summer.

There are infinite perspectives; it follows that there are infinite ways to represent these perspectives on a stage. In the late 19th and early/mid-20th centuries, conventions of dramaturgy were exploded open by modernist pioneers like Strindberg, Brecht, Maeterlinck and Gertrude Stein, who examined the components of drama in the interest of expanding what it's capable of expressing. Into the 1980s, innovative play forms thrived as we embraced plays from writers like Len Jenkin, Constance Congdon, Neal Bell and Marlane Meyer. The past couple of decades have seen a narrowing of this range, as exploratory plays are often dismissed in favor of a recognizable onstage world, in which time behaves as we more or less perceive it, in which behavior is essentially logical, and in which mysteries are explained. Like many new writers today, Dan LeFranc's work reflects an uneasiness with the relative conservatism of contemporary tastes while looking for ways to operate within it. The landscape of each play is decidedly current, populated by extraordinarily vivid, pop-culture-savvy, smart-mouthed twenty-first century characters.

…But none of his play-worlds behave in expected ways. Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, his New York debut (co-produced by Page 73 and Soho Rep in 2009), is almost naturalistic on its surface, set entirely inside a car over the actual amount of time it takes a boy and his father to drive sixty miles home from the boy's soccer game. Rather than depicting one car ride, the play compresses literally hundreds of car rides to dad's house from more than a decade of the boy's childhood, into one length of time, composed of flashing fragments woven seamlessly together. Looking to draw a portrait of a boy's coming of age, LeFranc finds his structure by forcing two conflicting storytelling modes together, filling a naturalistic frame with a mosaic of broken shards.

Below: a sample from The Big Meal, which LeFranc wrote on horizontal legal paper with a column for each actor, in a format somewhat similar to sheet music.


Looking back at the preoccupations of Dan's writing, I'm sitting here in my office surrounded by copies of his plays, each one a wholly unique physical object unto itself (see a sample from The Big Meal above), struck once again by the accomplishment of The Big Meal. An American family sits around the dinner table, a setting reminiscent of so many seminal plays, over the course of about 90 minutes. But, though it assumes the shape of a dining room play, taking up about as much time as a typical family meal, in the hands of LeFranc it encompasses entire lifespans: a family tree blooms and then thins as generations pass to generations, affirming the enormity of the world and its great, beautiful sadness. Impossibly, it's a play that somehow manages to give us a fleeting and tenuous, glimpse of time itself, the most elusive, maddening, malleable, unknowable and yet ever-present mystery of all.

- Adam Greenfield, Director of New Play Development

Generous support for our production of Assistance was provided by Time Warner, Inc., which also provides leadership support of The American Voice: New Play and Musical Theater Development at Playwrights Horizons.

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Jump to: Tickets // From Tim Sanford // Playwright's Perspective // Casting // Helpful Info

Jump to: Tickets // From Tim Sanford // Playwright's Perspective // Casting // Helpful Info

HOW TO RESERVE YOUR SEATS

SUBSCRIBERS & FLEXPASS HOLDERS:
ONLINE, visit www.ticketcentral.com and click on MY ACCOUNT to order your seats via our automated system*. BY PHONE, call Ticket Central, the box office for Playwrights Horizons, at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily). IN PERSON, visit Ticket Central at 416 West 42nd Street (between Ninth and Tenth Avenues), Noon-8pm daily.

MEMBER TICKETS ARE JUST $35 (reg. $60):
Member tickets to The Big Meal are $35 each for all performances through April 29. and may be reserved using any of the above methods. YOUNG MEMBERS: 30&Under Member tickets are $20; Student Member tickets are $10.

GUEST TICKETS subject to availability
SUBSCRIBERS: Order guest tickets for $45 each (reg. $60) when you reserve your own.
MEMBERS: Order one guest ticket per package per production for $50 (reg. $60) when you reserve your own. YOUNG MEMBERS: 30&Under guest tickets are $25. Student Member tickets are $15. Students may bring a 30&Under guest and vice versa.
FLEXPASS HOLDERS: FlexPass holders may use tickets in your account to bring guests. Add tickets to your account by calling Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily).

*IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME BOOKING ONLINE: please contact Ticket Central (Noon - 8pm daily) at (212) 279-4200 to get your account username and first-time user instructions. Your account has already been created and linked to your Subscription/FlexPass/Membership package -- please do NOT create a new account.

Having trouble booking online? For more detailed instructions, click HERE. Ticket Central is ready to help you get your username, reset your password, and/or walk you through the system at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily).

AGE-APPROPRIATE?
We recommend The Big Meal for those aged 10+.

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CONTACT US
If you would like to change your account preferences to either join or leave the Go Green program, please contact the Maketing Department at marketing@playwrightshorizons.org or (212) 564-1235, ext. 3152 (M-F, 10am-6pm). We respond to all questions, comments, and concerns. For questions or concerns about your tickets or package, please call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily). E-mail marketing@playwrightshorizons.org with questions or comments about productions.

The Sharp Theater Bulletin is generously funded, in part, by the Liman Foundation.
Special thanks to the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation and Jerome Foundation for their generous support of The Big Meal.

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Photos: Photos of Gina Gionfriddo, Kirsten Greenidge, Jordan Harrison, and Itamar Moses by Aaron Epstein. Photos of Leslye Headland and Dan LeFranc by Jeff Prout. Photo of Tim Sanford by Christine Gatti.