cover photo by Joan Marcus
“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
Originally produced by Second Stage Theater
1 M
I S B N: 0-88145-256-4, $12.95