Babette’s Feast: A Play in Eight Courses
Isak Dinesen’s short story and the 1988 film adapted from it are both celebrations of community and the ideals of the French Revolution told through a narrative of food. And now Theater Oobleck has turned Babette’s Feast into a real feast: audience members get to sit like semivisible time travelers as they receive the blessing of “a play in eight courses.” Although the evening is cleanly structured by those eight courses and by the gentle, inevitable opening up of Dinesen’s characters as they experience the pleasures of a delightful meal, Oobleck’s adaptation (headed by David Isaacson) puts an intriguing sardonic spin on the story’s notions of community and “the people.”
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The plot is simple: Babette, a French chef and revolutionary who survived the bloody end of the people’s government, the Commune of Paris, in 1871, has used her lottery winnings to cook a feast for the spartan, devout Norwegian community that sheltered her in exile. Under the influence of good food and wine, the small gathering forgets its long-held petty differences, remembers past pleasures, and grows close again. In the Oobleck version, audience members sit at one of two long wooden tables and feast on course after course of remarkable food, relaxing and being served with flashbacks of the characters’ lives and their interactions.
Other performances disrupt the ease of these naturalistic styles, as if the actors were smartly designed Disney animatronic characters, coming to life to perform a scene and then returning to stiff anonymity or the blank activity of eating and drinking. This contrast may be deliberate, or it may have to do with the lack of a director, but it breaks up the experience of the feast, reminding me of my outsider’s role and the artificiality of the situation. Added to the sarcastic, amateurish melodrama of the flashbacks, this disruption of the play’s “reality” drove some audience members back to their plates and private conversations.
