Photo by Jessica Sherman Photography
Bob Verini - Arts In LA
The premise of Benjamin Brand’s Taste, as the management of Sacred Fools Theater Company has been unabashedly eager to trumpet in preopening publicity, is a compact made between two men to meet for dinner, at which the guest is to be killed, butchered, cooked, and eaten by the host in what must qualify as the most unusual, and surely the most potentially savory, assisted suicide of all time. Read more…
Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw
Two men meet on the Internet and forge an unholy pact.
Screen and television writer Benjamin Brand’s first play, Taste, is based on a bizarre, true-crime episode from 2001, for which a German man named Armin Meiwes was convicted and eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.
Every grisly detail of the actual event was videotaped, so Taste is a factual play that reenacts the meeting between the two men and powerfully unfolds in real time.
It’s chilling stuff, yet it’s also inexplicably hilarious. Read more
Terry Morgan - Talkin’ Broadway
When one reads about a new play concerning cannibalism, directed by Stuart Gordon, the man who brought the world Re-Animator, one has certain preconceptions. Or at least I did. I presumed it would be gory and darkly humorous, and I was correct in those assumptions. What I didn’t expect was that it would be an essentially serious and weirdly touching character study, and I was pleasantly surprised by the brilliant performances. Read more…
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter
The fastidious Terry (Donal Thoms-Cappello), well-schooled from television chefs such as Jacques Pepin, caramelizes some onions in his carefully arranged apartment, the set of which consists primarily of a kitchen. Director Stuart Gordon, a gorefest connoisseur, invokes sensory recollections of cinematic Smell-O-Vision with the cepaceous aroma, when the awaited visitor comes to the door. Read more…
Now running through May 17.
