Grand Concourse Review

There’s an awful lot of food preparation on NYC stages these days. Recent works including Generations, My Mañana Comes, and even the upcoming Hugh Jackman-starrer The River feature live slicing-and-dicing (watch out for those fingers!). In Grand Concourse—premiering at Playwrights Horizons Off Broadway and running through Nov. 30—you’re even treated to the real-time frying of an egg, breakfast-y smell and all. However, despite all the food passing before your eyes, you may feel a little undernourished by play’s end. Heidi Schreck’s new play, set in the Bronx in a soup kitchen run by dress-down nun Shelley (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), certainly does not lack for empathy, using Rachel Hauck’s ultra-realistic kitchen backdrop as a kind of confessional for its disparate characters. Besides Shelley, whose prayers are offset against a microwave timer, there’s Oscar (Bobby Moreno), a streetwise, golden-hearted security guard, Frog (Lee Wilkof), a manically troubled but well-meaning homeless volunteer, and a new addition, Emma (Ismenia Mendes), a fragile, possibly depressive 19 year-old who threatens to turn Shelley’s life of order, religious and otherwise, into chaos.