Humana: The Oh, Gastronomy! Review

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Oh, Gastronomy!
Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival.
Written by Michael Golamco, Carson Kreiter, Steve Moulds, Tanya Saracho and Matt Schatz. Directed by Amy Attaway. Co-conceibed and developed with Sarah Lunnie.

Ordinarily on a Friday this time of year, I’m at the Yale Cabaret for a dose of youthful, well-devised, openly experimental live theater.
Friday night at the Humana Festival out here in Louisville, Kentucky, I felt utterly at home with Oh, Gastronomy!, a large-cast, youth-fueled thematic revue of short-short sketches. The main capitulation to mainstream tastes is the chosen theme—not sex or generational angst or sick sociopolitical but food, glorious food. Oh, Gastronomy’s title pays tribute to the classic progressive Ken Tynan revue Oh, Calcutta!, but instead of sex it serves second helpings of family feasts and second scoops of symbolic ice cream cones.

Any concerns that Oh, Gastronomy’s portions are too small, or half-cooked, are cleared away with the sure knowledge that another succulent morsel is coming around on the next tray. The show encompasses 28 separate scenes, a couple of which are serialized episodes with the same characters but nearly all of which are stand-alone vignettes.

The material—from five playwrights plus Sarah Lunnie, who’s given a “co-conceived and developed” credit, plus a director (Amy Attaway) who’s distinct from the writing team—is more hit than miss, with admirable range and style. What really makes it delectable, though is the spice added by the young ensemble cast (culled from Actors Theatre of Louisville’s year-long Apprenticeship program). There are unpredictable performance choices, deft deliveries and multi-talents (music, banana-eating), which take the writing to unexpected levels.
Considering that some of the scenes are literally wordplay games and little else—a few interludes consist of folks simply sitting in the theater aisles making puns on Shakespeare play titles—such punching-up is profound.But the overall standards of acting and comedy here are much higher than what’s actually required to put this material over.
This is a tight ensemble whose members are keen on impressing each other, not letting down the team, and doing stand-out independent work. The revue shifts fast enough that none of these precious black-out sketches overstays its welcome. There’s no pandering, waiting for the audience to “get” each routine before moving on.
A bout of grand comic characters (the multi-part “Fear and Loathing at the Food Truck, about hook-ups at a Farmers Market) might yield to inspired psychocomedy where diners at a restaurant order childhood memories instead of food, which might give way to gentle melodrama or a sensitive musical duet such as “Tastes Like Home” (expertly harmonized by vocalists Katie Medford and Alexander Kirby). The laugh-out-loud moments are frequent, and more honestly earned than in some of the calculated knockabout stuff elsewhere in this year’s Humana festival.

A moveable feast indeed, a tremendous showcase for a horde of hungry young actors. And, for me who missed this weekend’s Yale Cabaret offering, a comfy home away from home at 11 p.m. on a Friday night. Oh, Gastronomy has its final performance this morning at 10 a.m. and I might just go back for seconds.