A Holiday Treat At Edmond Town Hall

By Shannon Hicks

The next time someone suggests you go play with your food, you should take them up on the offer. Take them up, at least, if they say that you should go see Play With Your Food.

The Fairfield County theater group has been offering lunchtime theater offerings to lower Fairfield County since 2003, and has a running string of sold-out shows in Fairfield and Westport. Judging from the size of the group that turned out for PWYF’s debut performance on December 17 in Newtown, it won’t be long before a new string of sold-out shows can be added to the group’s resume.

“Every time I drive home from one of these events I wonder ‘Why aren’t we doing this here?’” said Kate Katcher, a Play With Your Food performer who helped to introduce the group’s first performance in Newtown, Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory (adapted by Russell Vandenbroucke). Ms Katcher also voiced appreciation for the Newtown Cultural Arts Commission, which co-sponsored the recent performance.

Play With Your Food events begin with lunch, followed by the featured performance. Last month The Alexandria Room at Edmond Town Hall was transformed into a pair of areas, one for eating and the second for viewing the reading of Capote’s autobiographical short story. Lunch had been provided by Katherine’s Kitchen of Sandy Hook, and offered ticket-holders a choice of three wrap-style sandwiches, a pasta salad, cookies and other like desserts, and coffee and soft drinks.

Thirty minutes is set aside for lunch, and then an hour is devoted to the performance and a TalkBack session with the performers.                                        

The December 17 event was fun and light. It was a very good play reading; the actors had obviously put time in to rehearsals prior to their reading.

A Christmas Story recalls Capote as an orphaned youth in the rural South during the 1930s. Living with a slightly dotty but loving “cousin” named Miss Sook Falk (a role filled by Florence Phillips) when he was 10 (Young Truman, or “Buddy,” was played by Kathryn Marchand), Capote lovingly and nostalgically relates their Christmastime rituals as Adult Truman (Sean Hannon).

Additional parts in the story include an Indian who makes moonshine and never smiles nicknamed Ha-Ha, Father, and a passerby, all of which were read by Don Striano, and the family dog Queenie, Mother, and “the rich mill owner’s lazy wife” (who offers an insulting amount of money to Buddy and Miss Sook Falk after they trek into the woods, chop their own Christmas tree, and drag the tree back into town), all of which were more than capably handled by Ms Katcher.

Play With Your Food and Newtown Cultural Arts Commission has already scheduled the next two performances at Edmond Town Hall. They will be Thursdays, February 18 and April 8, and will bring “lots more comedy” to The Alexandria Room, promised Ms Katcher.

“February’s show will be about relationships, and April will have a springtime theme,” she said.

Tickets for Play With Your Food events in Newtown are $30 each (prices are higher for the shows in Fairfield Greenwich and Westport), and need to be reserved in advance. Details about the February and April performances will be announced within a few weeks, and will be posted at NewtownArtsCommission.org as well as in The Newtown Bee.