It's no surprise that restaurants are frequently
staffed with creative types.
Often, the person who serves your wine also
serves heaping portions of community-conscientious, boundary-pushing art in
his or her spare time.
From kitschy oil painters to post-modern poets
to neo-punk guitarists to gritty film-makers, Lexington's hard-working
servers serve more than food and drink.
While Lexington's artist-waiters are as common
as bourbon and basketball, recognition for their talents is rare.
It is even more rare for a restaurant's
management to notice, let alone capitalize on the creative talents of its
staff.
Natasha's Café, however, sees it differently.
Café owners Natasha and Gene Williams, along
with artistic director Eric Ryan Seale, routinely encourage their
multi-talented, artistic-oriented employees to participate in the café's
resident theater company, Balagula Theatre.
Since actors, directors, and designers need a
space in which to perform and create, not to mention an audience, and since
restaurants need to fill a dining room, the unique marriage of theater and
dining at Natasha's is a comfortable one.
But more than that, it is intimate, energetic,
fun, meaningful, and even cheap.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the
theatre's recent installment of Surprise Theatre.
Billed as "100 percent holiday free" and
starring several Natasha's staff members, this weekend's non-holiday themed
Surprise Theatre performances promise a theater experience like none you've
ever seen, at only five dollars a ticket.
Just what is Surprise Theatre? Well, we aren't
really allowed to tell you. But the gist of it includes a series of brief,
10-minute plays that spring up naturally, or in some cases, wildly
unnaturally, during the course of dinner.
At last night's production alone, the historical
and sociological ramifications of the smiley face were pondered at gunpoint,
not to mention various over-used clichés that have become endemic in the
Oprah-like positivity of modern pop psychology culture -- pretty deep for a
10-minute play whose beginning is announced by a gray-bearded man flopping
on the ground.
In another surprising moment, a couple of diners
so ordinary they had to wait for a table erupted into a furiously absurd and
hilariously tender argument that made one question the little neuroticisms
that separate the normal from the quasi-insane.
To say that this scene involved the concept of
purses, oatmeal, a mate-less shoe, and a grubby picture frame does not do it
justice, but hopefully it will pique your curiosity.
The evening ended with a couple of adolescent
classic characters meeting a character from a grown-up classic, with
riotously absurd results. Somehow, the near-farcical, exaggerated innocence
of most of the scenes, not to mention a very interesting soundtrack, gave
the short drama a comically "adult" theme.
I can't say which well-known characters were
featured in this piece, but you can rule out Sweet Valley Twins meets Silas
Marner, though that might not be a bad idea for the theater's next
production in February, when the unique, bistro-house will feature its next
big Surprise Theatre event -- a sequel to last year's Valentine hit -- A
Night of Love, II.
