I’ve just seen Comfort Food, Zorana Sadiq’s second play. It’s another creation supported by Crow’s Theatre, and quite different from MixTape (2021), her one-woman debut show. Zorana is a woman of many talents, a classical singer & actor whose reflections on music and recordings made MixTape seem like the most natural thing in the world.

For her next work she is, pardon the choice of words, expanding her comfort zone, writing a far more complex work while undertaking the detailed portrayal of a personage of great vulnerability. I can’t decide if I’m more impressed by her writing or her acting, but both are remarkable.

I am very happy to see Crow’s Theatre making an investment in Canadian talent, director & dramaturg Mitchell Cushman helping to bring the script to the stage.

Zorana plays Bette, a television food show host who makes comfort food in front of her studio audience (who we seem to be), to be broadcast to the folks at home watching her show. Different food choices will be a big part of the play’s discourse, and not just for the tv show. Food can be political, in the way it expresses ethnicity, speaks for cultures & generations, attitudes about sustainability. The richness of the associations in the text accumulate & grow like rising bread-dough, even as we stay anchored in food & family.

We meet Bette’s teenaged son Kitkat played by Noah Grittani.

I’m glad I was on the phone last night with my daughter in USA, for a sort of reality check. The dialogue between Bette and Kit, between a mother and her son, felt totally authentic. I can’t calibrate ages anymore, but their dialogue is universal. And believable.

Of course things heat up between them, as you might expect. Kit is 15 and Bette is a single mom. Food is the most natural topic for a mom and her son to discuss, and to fight over. Zorana & Noah are superb as Bette & Kit.

We come in to a theatre space set up as if we’re going to watch Bette’s show, invited to put suggestions into the jar. Our “suggestions” seem to supply some of Zorana’s text, a bit of audience participation even if the ones she reads are 100% from her script and not truly spontaneous. But it’s a cool effect.

The stage is used with great economy, as we see Kit’s online life shown projected on the wall upstage. The design team deserve credit, including Sim Suzer (sets & props), Echo Zhou (lighting), Tori Morrison (video), the tiny studio theatre space feeling like a television studio.

Except for the last 3 minutes the play held me firmly, the conflicts so absorbing I was (speaking of food) swallowed up by the play and its drama.

When we came to the end I was impressed we were able to find a pathway that was not a tidy ending, but completely believable. For this part of the play I saw we were confronting ideas that were so big they couldn’t readily be concluded. And I’m glad Zorana chose not to tie up the loose ends in a typical theatrical “ending”, but instead left things in a much more realistic place, equivocal and ambiguous.

Comfort Food is a superb achievement from Zorana, whose writing takes us into a fully developed world that holds our attention, all while playing the lead part as perfectly as if she were a real tv host.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Zorana cooks up next with her dramatic voice. But for now she’s starring in Comfort Food, a full meal at Crow’s Theatre continuing at least until June 8th.