Photo: Chelcie Parry

What happened to our literature in 2020? What kind of document did we create of the vast bewilderment, the isolation, fear, and loss? With more distance, patterns will surely start to emerge — someone out there is probably already cooking up an English seminar on pandemic writing. If so, they should include Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal, a quietly surreal shapeshifter of a play with a tilted sense of humor and a generous, sorrowful heart. Koogler started writing Staff Meal in January 2020 and finished the first draft in April, and while the play is intriguing without that context, whole other strata of feeling and meaning reveal themselves once you know. Imagine watching a dance imported from an unfamiliar place — first, its shapes and rhythms are interesting; then you learn that it’s a funeral dance, a dance of mourning, and it becomes something else.

The play’s light, alinear movement circles around a restaurant — and also the idea of a restaurant. Onstage, there are tables and candles and silverware, Deco-printed wallpaper and low lighting, servers (Carmen M. Herlihy and Jess Barbagallo, both great at being sweetly weird, attentive, thoughtful), and the aura of a mythical owner whose name—Gary Robinson—the servers whisper with hypnotized reverence. “Have you read Flights of Fancy?” Barbagallo’s server asks an anxious new waiter (Hampton Fluker) about a book Gary has written, the contents of which are left vague. The new guy has not, which launches both senior servers into the kind of knowing homily you might get from a record-shop employee who’s appalled that you don’t own Blonde on Blonde:

Server 1: Everyone reads Acts of Service – almost no one reads Flights of Fancy.

Server 2: They’re companion pieces. You can’t understand one without the other.

S1: But literally no one reads Flights of Fancy!

S2: Some customers have. The true customers have.

S1: Obscure, but essential.

S2: It’s Gary Robinson’s best book.

In the show’s program, Koogler writes about being “fascinated by restaurants,” by “the intricate rhythm of a group of people working together to make and serve meals.” The metaphorical leap to theater isn’t hard to make. Both, at their best, are made up of intertwined “flights of fancy” and “acts of service.” Both are fueled by passion and, at their less-than-best, take advantage of it. Both involve a lot of unpaid or underpaid labor; weird schedules and too much alcohol; collaboration and vision; playfulness and rigor; a commitment to excellence and a belief, despite all the bullshit, in transcendence. The phenomenal Hulu show The Bear is about a restaurant, but its hero, Carmy, could be talking about theater when he offers this comfort to his fellow chef, Sydney: “Look, it’s probably hard for your dad to be supportive because he doesn’t understand that this job doesn’t pay much, it doesn’t amount to anything, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, you know?”

What else makes a restaurant the perfect symbol for playmaking? COVID-19 took both away from us. In Staff Meal, director Morgan Green and her scenic designer Jian Jung have mapped out a long arc from seeming normalcy to emptiness and absence. In the small Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Jung has constructed an ambitious set of interlocking, sliding walls that shape and reshape the space, slicing it into hard angles and, the further the play goes, swallowing both locations and people into pockets of darkness. Greg Keller and Susannah Flood are wonderful as a pair of kind weirdos who begin as coffee-shop strangers with a daily waving acquaintance, move toward an increasingly phantasmagorical first date at Gary Robinson’s restaurant, and then, beyond the warm, bizarre safety of the restaurant’s walls, disappear. “The city’s so dark tonight,” says Mina (Flood). “Why is everything closed?” says Ben (Keller), blinking into the shadows. “Where is everyone?” Mina whispers. “There’s no taxis, there’s no cars on the streets … I don’t hear the subway, the lights are all red.” Ben half laughs: “​The nuts — the guy who sells nuts, is gone…”

“I’m sorry, WHAT IS THIS PLAY ABOUT?” shouts the excellent Stephanie Barry during a wickedly funny moment of metatheatrical breakdown. I don’t want to spoil the whole sequence, but coming where it does, Barry’s question does more than make us laugh. We’ve got to take time with it, carry it with us for the rest of the show — and though much of what Barry has to say is straight-up hilarious (“Do you ever get this feeling with young writers, or early writers, writers who are developing … do you ever wonder: When will they develop?”), she’s also key to helping us understand that what this play is about is loss. Staff Meal is about loving something, spending time and care and effort on it, watching it evaporate in front of you anyway — then sitting in its absence and starting to wonder, What did it mean after all?

That’s where the title comes in. If you watch The Bear (or work at a restaurant), then you already know, but just in case, a digital marquee above the set fills us in: “STAFF MEAL: A meal that a restaurant serves its staff outside of business hours, free of charge.” So Staff Meal is a play for the people who make plays. “It’s a specific concept, this restaurant,” says Barbagallo’s server with scholarly confidence. “You have to know what you’re in for.” Herlihy’s server isn’t so sure. She tilts her head, musing: “But how many people are really into it? … Like if you make this restaurant, and you know it’s awesome, and your co-workers know it’s awesome, and rare, and special, and a few customers know that too, but most of the customers—the people who are actually like, supposed to eat at the restaurant—aren’t really that into it, is it really a good restaurant?” At this point, any artist in the audience is attempting to just be cool and do some deep breathing before going into a public panic attack.

Koogler knows that people are going to use words like “weird” and “surreal” and “experimental” to describe Staff Meal. He knows that the show is “a specific concept” and he is, in part, offering it as a gift to his co-workers, an act of service for the ones who lost their livelihoods and purpose when the world shifted. But he also knows that truly generous, worthwhile theater is never just for an in-crowd, and that “the people who are actually like, supposed to eat at the restaurant” need to feel welcomed — challenged, destabilized, surprised, yes, and also excited. It’s not about dumbing down or straightening out, but about working from a place of invitation. Great chefs can serve wild meals and great artmakers can take you on wild journeys if they’re working not from condescension but care.

But then, all the care in the world can’t prevent the tablecloth from getting pulled or the ground from caving in. If it’s not plague, it’s capitalism or plain shit luck. The servers nervously assure themselves that Gary Robinson is “pretty fucking rich” and “as long as Gary Robinson’s around we’ll be fine.” But who is Gary? Who’s actually in charge of anything, and how do we change systems we really have very little clue about when what we’d like to be doing is just making good things with good people? In Staff Meal, the unparalleled wildcard Erin Markey embodies both the spirit of chaos and the hidden haplessness of authority. As a lurking, mumbling, metamorphosing vagrant, they haunt both restaurant and play, grinning as they tell us, “I am the threat … And … [I] keep this whole thing going.” Markey is—and I say this as highest praise—a total freak. They almost break the show simply through their pronunciation of the word “chestnuts,” and when they inform us—about the hierarchy of ownership and management at the restaurant—“it’s vagrants all the way down,” there’s something downright Beckettian about it. Without recourse to literalism, Koogler conjures the quintessence of 2020 — the absurdity and fragility, the aimlessness and mental rabbit holes, waiting and grief, the forgetting how to talk to other people, listening to yourself and thinking I sound like an alien in a person suit. Staff Meal feels like a portal: We tumble through its funny, eerie evocation of the moment that made—is still making—our present, and we come out the other side feeling, for all its ebb toward emptiness, full.

Staff Meal is at Playwrights Horizons through May 19.