Art from D.M. Johnson, KNOCK #7

DRINKS

At rise: THE SACRIFICIAL VIRGIN enters. She is small and achingly beautiful, perhaps in ceremonial robes. She is gaudily adorned, a creature of Ancient Babylon or the Aztec Empire; perhaps she jingles when she walks. She holds a bowl the size of a tire. The bowl is overfull with red wine.

She pours the contents over her head, drenching herself and her robes with red wine.

Blackout.

APPETIZER

Perhaps the smell of microwave popcorn wafts through the room.
The ENSEMBLE speaks.

ENSEMBLE

I love food
I love to eat
I love the process of sharing
I love watching stuff grow
I have a special relationship with potatoes
They were considered Romanian
But she was born in Albania and he was born in Greece
I could never get a straight answer as to why they’re not Albanian or Greek
The vanilla ice cream covered in chocolate almond cookie coating with chocolate cake inside
All on a stick
That one had to be my favorite
The structure in my mouth is like what I used to eat at home
It’s like a gentle stroking
But from the inside
It’s amazing how much the smell permeates the house
There was this bumpy
Crunchy outside

Then luscious
Cold
Smooth vanilla ice cream
And then this tepid bit of chocolate deliciousness in the center
It was never cold
I don’t know how they did that
There was a big potato pause after I left home
The smell is wrapped up in the process
The smell of flame
Something burning
Bacon
Sausage
Biscuits
And gravy
Their two kids before me died
So my parents were really careful about nutrition
You definitely get buttermouth
But it’s not greasy
The smell of cheese is strong and pungent
You cut it with scissors
Not a knife
The house smelled like lemon and garlic
My mother’s mother’s was a safe place
My stepfathers’ peoples’ house was not safe
Philo is a texture
It’s like that industrial kitchen smell
Somehow it tastes red and clean and adult
Onions and shaved carrots were points of contention
Her diet was like The Zone
All steak and chicken and lamb and spanakopita
I don’t know how to describe a biscuit
It’s just good
If a biscuit were a celebrity
It would be Kelly Ripa
The chicken was different from store-bought chicken
We had fresh chicken from the chicken farm next door
I think maybe it was gamy
I’m not sure
But it tasted different from store-bought chicken
She loves hydrangeas
So there were always hydrangeas on the table
Hers left this delicate
Salty taste on your lips
I’m weird about texture
So I’d sometimes eat the outside first so the ice cream and chocolate was a feeling unto itself
And I would lick the wooden stick at the end
You bisect them then pour the white gravy over both pieces
You dip your hand way down in the pot with the warm
Soft potato
And you pull up the sauerkraut
You could smear it on your skin like a beauty mask
There was lots of internal dissent about how to make it
In Jamaica
Everyone breast-feeds
It’s traditional
They just whip them out, like boom
I know it’s a cliché
But it tastes just like chicken
You had to eat it like a dog
It’s fun to suck it through your teeth
It was always cut a little too large for our mouths
It makes you feel full and complete
It makes me want to sit on the couch under a blanket and pretend to be sick
It wasn’t very sweet
It was like placebo chocolate
It looked like chocolate but I don’t remember it being very chocolaty
It’s zucchini
Parmesan
Egg
Basil
Onion
Cottage cheese and flour
It’s like a croissant
Like a real croissant
So many layers
The porridge tasted like breast-milk
You don’t have to chew it
Actually
You could just lick it
I swear
That’s what she said when we were leaving
Ya’ll get a bellyfull
It’s really good reheated too
I eat it fast
And always inside
I don’t take it outside
I don’t want anyone to see me eating it
I said
Somebody’s got to figure out how to make this before she dies

A WAITER enters. He rings a bell.

MAIN COURSE

To be written. This is basically a zany, comical Kaufman-and-Harteque dinner party at the home of a sacrificial, cannibal emperor in something resembling ancient Babylon or the Aztec Empire. The VIRGIN drenched in red wine is served. Maybe there’s a case of mistaken identity.

DESSERT

The set of a cooking show. ENSEMBLE hands out cookies as the CHEF narrates, perhaps vamping with kitchen equipment.

CHEF

Okay, so uh

Today we’re going to be looking at an old standby: chocolate chip cookies. First thing I want you to do is: smell the cookie. Good, right? Take a big whiff. Now we’re going to taste the cookie. Take your time. Hold the bite in your mouth. Let the chocolate melt a little. Feel the rough texture of the cookie against your tongue, and the roof of your mouth. Roll it around a little. Go ahead.

OK, so far, so good, huh? Let me tell you about this basic recipe: there isn’t a lot of variation in cookie recipes, as you well know - semisweet chocolate, flour, egg, butter, sugar. A pinch of salt. Vanilla. Maybe a few surprise ingredients; cloves, cinnamon, minor variations like nuts. Grease a pan, toss it in the oven, you’re done.

But this recipe is history. The cookie you’re eating now traces its conceptual roots back to 1937. My great-grandmother, Ruth Graves Wakefield, was making chocolate cookie but ran out of regular baker’s chocolate and substituted broken pieces of semi-sweet choclate, assuming it would melt and mix into the batter. It didn’t. The restrant, housed in a former toll house built in 1709, was handed down through three generations of my family and burned down in 1984. I was thirteen. I watched as generations of my family history burned to the ground, photographs, cookbooks, old stone ovens. Centuries, molecules of food older than America. The smell of my grandmother, warm butter and brown sugar. Lemons and cinnamon.

There were variations, perfections, little extras - I won’t give away all of my secrets, but what is in your mouth is love. What’s in your mouth is human labor and time and the kind of power that can only be given voluntarily.

Okay, so far so good? Now, on to the next step:
Take another bite.
Hold in your mouth. Taste the history, the emotion that went into that cookie.
Now, what we’re going it do is, I’m going to tell you that I’m lying.

The taste of that cookie was engineered in a laboratory off of the New Jersey Turnpike, in a sterile white room lit by fluorescents, by a team of food scientists. It contains over 6,000 chemicals, including some known to have carcinogenic properties. The eggs in the cookies come from chickens shoved into cages that are stacked on top of one another, and shit constantly falls onto the birds. Disease is widespread. The milk is from a cow injected with a growth hormone that makes its udder swollen and infected. There is often pus and blood in the milk. The flour is from industrially threshed wheat, harvested by underpaid illegal immigrants, working extremely dangerous conditions with no health protection. The cookie is laden with high-fructose corn syrup, a major contributor to diabetes and obesity.

The cookie that you hold is about 130 calories. All told, it took almost a thousand calories of fossil fuel to get it from the farms it came from into your hands.

Take another bite.
This is also the taste of history.
This is also the taste of peoples’ hard work.
Does it taste the same as it did when you thought my grandmother was the lady who invented chocolate chip cookies?
Of course it does.
How could it not?

END PLAY.

Jason Grote’s plays include 1001, This Storm is What We Call Progress, Hamilton Township, and Box Americana.  His work has been presented at Baltimore CenterStage, Clubbed Thumb, The Contemporary American Theater Festival, CUNY’s Prelude ‘06 Festival, Denver Center Theater, The Glej Theater (Ljubljana, Slovenia), HERE, The Lark, The Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, The NY Fringe, The O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, The Playwrights’ Foundation, Soho Rep, The Williamstown Theater Festival workshop, and The Working Theater. Honors include a nomination for the Kesselring Prize; finalist for the Weissberger Award; a Sloan Commission from Ensemble Studio Theatre; and The P73 Playwriting Fellowship.  He is a member of PEN and New Dramatists.  

Visit him at jasongrote.com.

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