Zorana Sadiq and Noah Grittani in Comfort Food | Photo by Dahlia Katz
“As I kept working, I found I could hold them in the palm of my hand, which meant that I could see the thing from so many sides.”
This is a pithy bit from Zorana Sadiq’s Playwright Note for Comfort Food in which she considers the intimate potential of the mother-son dynamic she’s crafted. A brief meditation on gardening, the complex nature of sustenance for both plants and people—the whole composition is quite lovely and full of insights. In this way, it is like the play itself, presented by Crow’s Theatre, which packs a significant amount of ideas and familial nuances into its 90 minutes. With director and dramaturg, Mitchell Cushman, Sadiq creates a naturalistic, consistently gripping two-hander.
Sadiq herself plays Bette, a single mother who hosts a successful cooking show. Many scenes play out as live tapings of Comfort Food with us as its in-story audience, an overhead camera and video projections providing close-up views of food prep that add messy texture to the unfolding story. Having started off with a humble yet popular YouTube channel featuring her young son, she’s now a network phenomenon. While her son, KitKat (Noah Grittani), no longer appears, he’s very much present in her angsty, passive-aggressive rants about the challenges of mothering a now-reticent teenager.
A fully grounded and natural performer, Sadiq’s Bette is an unsurprisingly compelling figure. As she loses her grip, on both her show and her son, Bette’s increasing anxiety manifests in a warm charisma and understated tells. Sadiq is also very funny with a masterful knack for quips. We intuitively understand where Bette’s son gets his sarcastic edge. Gangly and endearing, Grittani does a fine job conveying a 15-year-old’s awkward self-assertion. Though withdrawn from his mother, Kit is a fully engaged climate activist, boasting a significant following in online spaces such as YouTube, Discord and TikTok. The pair convey both the genuine affection and disquieting strain of this relationship. The first sign of its intensity comes with his return to her show where a cute segment about science-themed sliders quickly escalates into a full-on televised protest.
Grittani also flexes his chameleonic chops as a series of young male guests whose clashing ideologies prompt Bette’s playful antagonism and provide a boost in her ratings. Each of these guys offer satirical little nods at social media influencers with their branded vibes, while also subtly representing aspects of her obsessive son. In a very well-integrated hallucinatory segment, she begins talking directly to one of them as her son—a heartfelt and exhilarating moment where the subtext of these supporting characters suddenly collapses into text.
As Bette’s show sheds its folksy trappings for slick corporate branding, Kit’s online interactions get darker. Our dread increases as his passionate planet advocacy gradually opens him up to paranoid hysteria. He’s lured to the dark web, has a violent altercation with a fellow young activist and teases a DIY skåne bow project that sent chills up my spine.
In addition to representing the televised artifice of Bette’s show, Tori Morrison’s video design also blows up Kit’s vlogging sessions. Sim Suzer’s set is a wide expanse of domestic shelving with central sliding doors to reveal Kit’s claustrophobic cubby. He and his computer are crammed into this nook, shut off from his mother’s concerned gaze—a safe space for him to blast himself into cyberspace.
There is one especially resonant little gesture that sells their proximity and estrangement—a clever bit of business where Bette instinctively pushes the extended cord of Kit’s vlogging apparatus up over her head as it collides with her chest. It is such a blasé motion yet it got a small laugh, conveying years of being haphazardly caught in and dismissed by his rebellious adolescent trajectory.
The play is full of clever thematic shading. Rattling throughout their interactions are notions about earthy authenticity and strategic, sustainable technologies. Bette is very much caught between two opposing belief systems—the myth of abundance she was born into and the resource scarcity her son’s generation has been confronting since childhood. Bette is sympathetic and aware, of course, she doesn’t have her head in the sand, but she is also obligated to foster her son’s immediate well-being amidst a global crisis and the resulting fear and rage.
Some speaker-phone calls with her agent (voiced by Aviva Armour-Orstroff) punctuate the drama with glimpses into the show-biz pressures that complicate the already tense situation. Bette must negotiate a changing media landscape that echoes Kit’s emerging selfhood. The contents of a secured locker that he obsessively safeguards—becoming ever more ominous as his fixations darken—are a surprising and deeply satisfying pay-off for our anxious speculation.
Also, if you like sourdough bread, there’s a thematically-integrated little treat in store for you!
Comfort Food
running May 13 to June 8, 2025
Streetcar Crowsnest, Studio Theatre (345 Carlaw Avenue)
running time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Zorana Sadiq and Noah Grittani in Comfort Food | Photo by Dahlia Katz