Dinner with Demons

Jonathan Reynolds whips up an entire meal onstage while spinning funny and touching anecdotes about his parents, his jet-setting uncle, and his famous movie star cousin. The play explores everything from the role of food at the family dinner table to the eternal connection between food and seduction - a piquant melange of performance, cookery and storytelling that can literally be described as "mouthwatering." "A spectacular, delicious, and perfect experience. DINNER WITH DEMONS is the best thing I have seen all year, and it is late in December. It was perfect. I want to get a pair of tickets for my mother-in-law. It was a perfect evening of theater. It was perfectly performed, the set was gorgeous, everything about it was magical." -Mario Batali "The recipe for a cooking show seems to be personal reminiscences induced by cooking, and philosophy induced by autobiography. So we have Jonathan Reynolds, playwright and culinary columnist, combining his two skills into DINNER WITH DEMONS, a dazzling display of cookery with polished palaver that is mostly witty or, at the very least, cute. For me, as a kitchen-illiterate, the array of fancy dishes dexterously prepared is breathtaking, and the reminiscing no less savory: dusted with the surreal, spiced with the apocryphal, but crisp or bittersweet or mellow to match the food it garnishes. The main characters are a domineering and resented mother, nicknamed the Warden; a divorced, remote, superrich, Don Juan-esque father; and dapper, civilized, always helpful Uncle Bus. Also a rogue's gallery of Mother's satanic associates, and Bus's angelically irresistible daughter, Lee Remick: 'I fell in love with her the way most people who met her did - at first sight, passionately, and like a sheepdog.' This when Jonathan was three, and Lee nine. The reason for the show's title is that 'if you can't exorcise your demons, you might as well have 'em over for dinner.' Some of these demons are long dead, some of them malevolent, but all coming to the scrumptious and memorious meal Jonathan is cooking up as he talks smoothly, manipulates food like a prestidigitator, and exudes the Reynolds charm." -John Simon, New York Magazine