Salad of the Bad Cafe

Salad of the Bad Café (1999)

Salad of the Bad Café is a postmodern cabaret inspired by Carson McCullers’ novel Ballad of the Sad Café and the lives of Tennessee Williams and Yukio Mishima. It is a treatise on love in a post-claustrophobic era. The play begins in 1945, in the summer that lay between the war and the postwar period when Japan was weeping, the American South was seething and the word "gender" was mostly used in grammar class. The setting is a café where people come to spend a few hours so that the "deep bitter knowing that their life is not worth much can be laid to rest." A cast of characters who represent race, gender, and regional stereotypes include the drunken homosexual writer, the mutant refugee, the geisha, and the faded southern belle. Telling a story of unrequited love, the piece combines poetry, visual humor and dance in an attempt to demystify the Queer, disorientate the Orient and demythify the Southern Gothic and the American Grotesque. 

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Winner of an Astraea Grant.

Salad of the Bad Café was presented at the Drill Hall (1999) and Queen Mary University of London (2000) in London; La Mama ETC in NYC (2000); World Theatre Festival in Amherst Mass (2000); UC Davis and Berkley Universities in California and as part of an artist residency Wellesley College (2000). 

Footage of the performance can be found here.