| Gremolata Regulars |  As part of our ongoing series of interviews with notable Torontonians on food and related subjects, Gremolata recently caught up with Toronto playwright Claudia Dey, just as her newest work, Trout Stanley, is about to open at the Factory Theatre: January 8 to February 6. Dey's plays include Beaver and The Gwendolyn Poems (see biography below). Gremolata: In your new play, Trout Stanley, one of the characters says, "Cooking is an act of love." Can you elaborate?
Claudia Dey: Trout Stanley: part sensualist, part werewolf has been walking north for ten years. He stumbles on the home of Sugar and Grace Ducharme, twins though they look nothing alike. His ine: "I believe that cooking is an act of love" is part of the grand and apocalyptic seduction of one Sugar Ducharme. It begins with an extended description of the way that snails make love, makes brief mention of cooking and other rarities, and ends with: "I believe that the nipple, the tongue, the lips, the place where the ear meets the neck, our eyelashes, as well as our sensual parts are nature's most gracious offerings. I believe in fragility slowness an' the long way around. I believe that the soul has a taste, a colour an' a smell an' I believe that the soul can have orgasms. I believe that we're all animals; an' that anything worth anything comes from the beast within."
 G: Interesting: Grace, Trout, Sugar, even snails are all associated with eating. Is it just me or is there something of an epicurean theme in Trout Stanley?
CD: The cuisine in the play is seventies' rec room chatelaine cuisine: pop tarts, family favourites, baby duck. But, in terms of a larger epicurean theme, I would say that it would have to do more with the taste of human beings than with food per se. Though, food figures into it - as it does in everything domestic or seductive - the play alternating between these two points; a well-oiled home universe and the coup de foudre arrival of eternal love. Exhibit a: trout and sugar vow to head north together "First thing. After breakfast." Exhibit b: a roast is made. A roast is shot.
The royal positioning of food in everything I write comes from my experience as a cook in bush camps - six summers north, ten thousand meals served. Trout Stanley is set in the North, an otherworld with its own urgencies - particular to it; bears, twenty hours of daylight, motel room acrobatics. My association with the north is so strongly tied to the pounds of beef, crates of pears, bags of rice that were my universe for so long. It is inevitable that this should seep into the world of the play.
 G: What would one do with those crates of beef, etc? Of the 10,000 meals you served, do any stick into your memory?
CD: One would try to trick the vulnerable bug-feasted, snot-nosed chronically injured tree planter into believing that one was serving them the food that their mother might serve. Home cooking. The twist was in quantity: we would make ten loaves of bread a day, cook twenty five pounds of beef for a spaghetti sauce, make three giant bowls of salad, three giant trays of desert. Everything multiplied by five, ten. Our budgets were famously small so we had to be inventive. By the end of the week we would have to "MacGyver" - named for the horrible show in the eighties - the man with a seemingly bottomless sense of invention. The favourite was always the bread; molasses, honey, oats - it has the texture of birthday cake, flesh. Though, a theme meal in the middle of a swamp or sun bleached desert campsite was always a hit: Thai, Greek, et al.
G: You've also had "day jobs" catering in Toronto. How does that audience differ from the bush camps?
CD: Less drool and more "no, I couldn't possibly." starched shirts and champagne flutes versus duct taped hands and bearded faces. Also, in the North, I don't have to wear a bow tie.
G: What do like to cook for yourself?
CD: Right now, our most exotic ingredient is natto - fermented soybeans with a slug-ish texture that we wrap in seaweed, with shiso leaves, gomasio, and wasabi. For health more than for pleasure. Our ultimate meal was our New Years Eve meal: two whole red snappers stuffed with lemon, cilantro; a stir-fry of miniature bok choy, red Swiss chard, shelled edamame and garlic; wild rice with burdock and shitake mushrooms; homemade bread and a winter salad - equal parts carrot, cabbage, sauerkraut, pumpkin seeds, hemp oil. Delicious. We have also just rediscovered the glories of red meat. Steak has a particular place in our hearts.
G: Do you ever cook snails?
CD: No, but I have eaten them. And horse.
* * *
CLAUDIA DEY
Plays: Beaver (Factory Theatre, Horse Trade Theatre Group New York, published by Playwrights Canada Press; currently being translated into French by Yvan Bienvenue for Theatre La Licorne, Montréal, 2005-2006 season), The Gwendolyn Poems (Factory Theatre, published by Playwrights Canada Press, Governor General’s Award Nominee, Trillium Award Finalist), Trout Stanley (Ship’s Company Theatre, Factory Theatre.) Claudia was one of the lyricists on the recent Theatre Asylum creation, BeBe, and she is the librettist for the upcoming Handless Maiden, composer Wende Bartley. Claudia is also a graduate of McGill University and the National Theatre School – where she now works as a guest artist. Claudia is writing a novella. |
