The Big Meal
Opening Night: March 1, 2012
Closing: April 8, 2012
Theater: Playwrights Horizons
Somewhere in America, in a typical suburban restaurant on a typical night, Sam and Nicole meet. And sparks fly, setting in motion an expansive tale that traverses five generations of a modern family, from first kiss to final goodbye. A stunning, big-hearted play that spans nearly eighty years in a single sitting, The Big Meal tells the extraordinary story of an ordinary family.
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March 21, 2012
It would probably be wise to eat dinner before attending “The Big Meal,” a new play by Dan LeFranc that opened Wednesday night at Playwrights Horizons. The consumption of plates of everyday foods — chicken fingers and fries, spaghetti, mashed potatoes — becomes charged with ominous portent in this comic drama about love, marriage, child rearing and the general brisk rush of human life, in which you turn around and find that youth has vamoosed and taken with it a lot of your dearest held assumptions about the way things would turn out.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 21, 2012
Dan LeFranc’s tasty and energetically acted little comedy "The Big Meal” is being served through April 8 at Playwrights Horizons.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 21, 2012
The Big Meal takes an unusual look at an everyday phenomenon. Two young people, Sam and Nicole, meet at a restaurant for a drink. As the years pass, they get married, have children, and get old. Suddenly they’re responsible for having brought four generations of humanity into the world, with all the attendant joy and misery.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 21, 2012
Anyone who’s part of a family will find recognizable moments in Dan LeFranc’s touching but unsentimental new play, "The Big Meal." Rapid-fire vignettes speed past in much the same way that life seems to do at times, as successive generations of a middle-class American family measure out their lives in highs and lows at restaurant meals.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 22, 2012
The new off-Broadway show “The Big Meal” is high-concept, to say the least. In just 90 minutes, playwright Dan LeFranc tracks Nicole and Sam over several generations — romance, marriage, tensions with in-laws, arguments and reconciliations, bickering offspring, births and deaths.
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March 21, 2012
In his ambitious and technically impressive new play, Dan LeFranc creates a theatrical effect I thought only possible in films like Koyaanisqatsi. Over the course of The Big Meal’s 85 minutes, LeFranc portrays a couple meeting, dating, falling in love, giving birth to children, losing parents, having grandchildren, great-grandchildren and finally dying. Nine actors—spanning tweens to septuagenarians, play dozens of characters in this ultra-condensed transgenerational saga, which let’s call time-lapse dramaturgy. It’s like telling the story of a person’s life in haircuts or doctor appointments. In this case, the threading events are dinners at restaurants. Difference is, when the grim Server (Molly Ward) approaches customers with a plate of food, it’s time to settle up the bill in the mortal sense.
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