Food by Geoff Sobelle

Why do you eat what you eat? Where does it come from? What does it really cost? Welcome to Geoff Sobelle’s intimate dinner party where stage illusion and an absurdist sense of humor combine with Sobelle’s virtuosic physical comedy to create a meditation on our personal relationship to food. At this dinner party you don’t eat much, but Sobelle gives you plenty to chew on whether you choose to sit at the table or observe from the sidelines. It’s 90 minutes of theater “every bit as primal, one suspects, as our love of eating” (The New York Times).

Food is the third of a trilogy of Sobelle performance works that explore the uncommonness of common themes. Krannert Center audiences may remember the 2019 presentation of Sobelle’s Home, when a house was constructed onstage and the audience participated in creating the memories inhabited by that home. Similarly, Food evokes sounds, scents, and images that shape a conversation about personal memories, consumption, and the evolution of food processing. “I don’t want to tell people what to think,” Sobelle says. “I just hope it tickles them and their curiosity, and that it provokes something that they then want to go talk about at the bar or wherever their next destination is.”