Photograph by T Charles Erickson courtesy of the Guthrie Theater
Floyd's at the Guthrie Theater
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage premiered a new play at the Guthrie last week: Floyd’s is a cooker.
Set in a truck-stop kitchen, the players include single mom Tish, romantic Rafael, mysterious Jason, and zen guide Montrellous who are all lorded over by Floyd, the rough and brassy lady running the joint. It’s a crew you could find in many kitchens around town, but their unifying core is that they’ve all done time. Despite the fact that this is a play about living with and through your mistakes, it’s hysterical and real, and it will make you hungry.
Because hope is a sandwich.
This isn’t a bid for the food-set. It’s not some glorious celebration of kitchen and cooking life, but it does accurately tip to the raw and revealing nature of working in a kitchen with knives and heat, thinner boundaries, low pay, and desperation. This play would not be the same if set in a cubicle farm.
Throughout their shifts, the team plays a game in which they list off the ingredients of their perfect sandwich, and it feels like a what-would-you-do-if-you-won-the-lottery kind of volley. They all dream of that ideal, and secretly make versions of it for each other to try, striving for a bit of honor and creative freedom that they can’t find in a place where Floyd does nothing but beat them down, order ham and cheese on white bread, and remind them of their status as formerly incarcerated felons.
Of course they are all flawed, but it’s their humanity on the other side of their mistakes that allows us to see ourselves in ex-cons. We are all trapped by choices made, mistakes that must be owned and then moved through, for many of us it’s so much easier without the sentence. But while we cut ourselves slack, these characters are only learning how to value themselves as something simple and honest, and yet worthy. Like a sandwich.
My favorite lines: Can we ever make the perfect sandwich? If we do, how will we know?
Multi layer sandwich
The sandwich I made after seeing this play.
It's not surprising to me that Nottage was recently named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. She knows how to wring the tension and then release it with a laugh, while building your expectations and keeping the flow of a kitchen and its story moving. I loved this play. Without giving too much away, in the end there is love and laughter, there is connection, there is possibility, and there is a sandwich. You will walk out wishing they were serving bites of grilled cheese as you leave. Or, you might do as I did, and go home to make your perfect sandwich. Whatever that means.
Floyd's is playing now through August 31. Get your tickets, and then watch this vid of Nottage describing her favorite part: imagining the sandwiches.
