First of All, There's Food

   There’s love, there’s money, there’s sex. But first there’s food. For playwright Tina Howe, nothing reveals more about people than the way they eat in “The Art of Dining.â€

   Or don’t eat.

   Each set of characters takes a turn in the Golden Carousel, a restaurant just opened by former lawyer Cal (Andrew Joffe). In anguished pursuit of money and fame, Cal devours everything Ellen, his chef and wife, played by Clover Bell-Devaney, is cooking: All the floating island, all the green grapes, all the hollandaise on the night’s menu.

   Next, and more painful to watch, is Melissa Wolff’s Elizabeth, a young writer meeting publisher David Osslow, amiably played by Charlie Tirrell. Elizabeth is so paralyzed by memories of her mother whose lipstick bled routinely into the food on her dinner plate, she cannot eat at all. (Mention of Revlon’s Fire and Ice lipstick famously peddled by model Dorian Leigh in the 1950s precipitated a little sigh from audience members of a certain age.)

   And then there is the trio on a ladies’ night out, played by Joan Coombs, Gail Ryan, Joanna Seaton, mispronouncing wines (like sounding the first T in Montrachet) and stepping all over their own and each others’ worries about blotchy breasts and extra pounds.

   Most delightful of all were the Galts (Valerie von Volz and Gary Cookson) reading the menu as foreplay.

   Once again, Aglet produced entertaining theater, even when high winds cut power lines and left Sharon Playhouse’s Bok Gallery in the dark, Saturday night. But actors followed their scripts by flashlight and an automobile’s high beams shining through the gallery’s front door replaced, sort of, the usual stage lighting, allowing us to linger for a while in Howe’s strange and funny world.

                                                                  — Marsden Epworth

   Among the plays being considered for Aglet’s fall season are “Toys in the Attic†and “That  Championship Season.†For information, go to www.aglettheatre.net or call 860-435-6928.