‘Let Me Cook For You’ Interactive Performance Blends Storytelling With The Art Of Making A Meal

Italian immigrant artist Orietta Crispino’s solo show Let Me Cook For You will run April 28th through May 28th at Theaterlab in New York City. The immersive show, performed for an intimate audience of 15 people each night, includes a home-cooked meal, an installation of clothing pieces from Crispino’s collection and a closing ceremony. The show is a meditation on a life in service of others. Let Me Cook For You is directed and co-created by Liza Cassidy and produced by Molly Shayna Cohen.

Crispino is a playwright and performer who serves as the Artistic Director of Theaterlab. She graduated from the Piccolo Teatro School in Milan and later went on to teach acting and directing there. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. Ms. Crispino’s acting credits include The Library (Crossing the Line Festival, FIAF); In the House of My Beloved (WP Theater); The Living Room Series (HERE); Dancing, Not Dead (The Internationalists); Dante’s Inferno (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), and Snow in the Living Room (Theaterlab). Her most recent productions at Theaterlab are Three Sisters Come and Go; Snow in the Living Room, a retelling of the Brothers Grimms’ Snow White; and Let Me Cook For You.

Forbes spoke to Crispino via email about how she went about creating this show from her life experience. She also discussed how her audience reacted after performances and what she feels the intimacy of the show brings to its viewers.

Risa Sarachan: I love the concept behind Let Me Cook For You. How did you go about creating it?

Orietta Crispino: I started working on the idea of an intimate show featuring my ‘self ‘ as a character, after reopening Theaterlab at West 36th Street. I was running the space and the organization by myself for a year and a half after a traumatic move from downtown.

It was my first attempt at a solo show, writing it at night in my very little spare time. Then I had the opportunity to perform in a beautiful site-specific project by Fanny De Chaillé, a brilliant French theater maker, The Library, presented at Crossing The Line Festival. Working with Fanny, in that instance, I started shaping my writing for one audience at a time, building a chronological arc of 20 minutes. After that, at Theaterlab in 2017, my team and I created a residency program, Mothers Myths Monsters, where for the first time, I presented a very short iteration of Let Me Cook For You centered on preparing food. Since then, I have performed live two of the three parts that make up Let Me Cook for You | The Trilogy in order to develop the full show. It’s hard to rehearse something that it’s so intimately dependent on the audience’s presence, even though, in this case, I don’t ask my audience to do anything other than just being there, fully as witnesses, letting me be at their service.

Sarachan: Why did you want to share a home-cooked meal with your audience?

Crispino: I developed the piece performing it, and at the beginning, the audience didn’t know that they were going to be fed. It was unsettling for some of them, but I loved the fact that cooking the food was happening almost as an act of magic. It is still very magical, the way it happens, since there’s no kitchen in the Gallery, which is a space meant to show art. I wanted to invite the audience to make a connection between the art of storytelling and preparing food. In Let Me Cook for You, in a way, I ask permission to tell my story, offering it as the main ingredient of this performance while caring for them. I also play a bit with stereotypes. I am Italian, and most of the time, inevitably, I am associated with food. I don’t cook an Italian meal, subverting expectations, hopefully connecting more deeply to the idea of caring others, or to the ‘kindness of strangers’ that I have experienced in my life and that I wanted to give back, somehow in a ritualized manner.

Sarachan: Does your menu vary nightly, or do you always cook a signature dish?

Crispino: I cook the same dish every time, and yet, it’s always different. I make a point of talking about the impossibility of repetition, equating preparing food in this context to art making. Live theater is always different every time even when we repeat the same lines and the same gestures.

Sarachan: Your show really creates an intimate environment. Do you have any memories of audience reactions during your performance that stood out to you?

Crispino: I have a notebook of notes left for me by the audience after the performances. They are very lovely and heartwarming. But what stands out for me these days is always the question I am asked at the end of the show: was it all true?

Sarachan: In Let Me Cook For You, you go through clothes that you brought to New York from Milan. What is special to you about these pieces?

Crispino: In the second episode of the trilogy, This Would Look Good On You, I examine the journey of my character so far by going through a third of my wardrobe which is made up of clothes that my mother left me or bought for me and from the precious gifts that her friends gave me when we were all mourning her sudden loss. After my mother died, it seemed that all her friends grieved her death through me. They kept me alive, sheltering me, feeding me, clothing me, each garment holding the promise of a healthy and happy life. I was the recipient of so much love! But what could I do with a Versace Couture dress that seemed to be ready for the red carpet? Was I supposed to fulfill that inherent, silent promise carried by that dress? And how? The memories sparked by the garments you’ll see in the show (a feast for the eye), in the end, they will all come together to reaffirm what I chose over and over: theater, art-making, the ecstasy of beauty, despite or maybe thanks to the many costumes and selves that I played throughout my life.

Sarachan: What can audience members expect from this performance?

Crispino: A delicious vegetarian meal, wine, Italian cake, vintage designer clothes, striking colors, rituals, many laughs and a few cries.

It’s a peaceful gathering, a multi-sensory experience where beauty is a gift as intoxicating as the art of telling stories, and life is a delicious meal.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tickets for Let Me Cook For You can be purchased here.