A Culinary Dance

Props gurus Frank Alberno and Maureen Hennessey faced a serious gastronomic challenge earlier this year at Long Wharf Theatre, as director Jade King Carroll worked through the script for Having Our Say: Stage a convincing ​“ballet of food” nightly, in which it appeared that the characters were cooking a full meal from start to finish in two hours, with a kitchen that was more set design than full function.

Having Our Say, which is currently playing at Long Wharf through March 13, revolves around two aged sisters — Sadie and Bessie Delaney (Olivia Cole and Brenda Pressley) — preparing a meal for their late papa’s birthday.

It is a ​“culinary dance,” said Hennessey, the theater’s props resident, in which everything in the drama has a food-fueled translation. Motions as simple as chopping tubers, washing and glazing meats, and mixing flour and eggs connect the past, present, and future, tying main characters to those who came before them, and those who will come after they are gone.

In their 100-plus years on this earth, Sadie and Bessie know that dance better than most. The rough chop of turnips mingles with a conversation about Jim Crow laws in the 1920s South, and how the sisters lived under them as children. Southern-style ambrosia becomes a fragrant tribute to family recipes, made exactly as the girls first tasted them in their youth. Macaroni and cheese, glinting fine china, a linen tablecloth are the vehicles through which the women discuss their parents. The play’s ending is timed with the sweet smell of pound cake.

It all looks relatively seamless. But for the props department working behind the scenes, it has required detailed research, weeks of culinary testing, and a taste for dramaturgy that goes above and beyond what’s usually expected of a show. Staff members keep at it, Assistant Props Manager Alberino said before a recent performance, for the total thrill of getting it right, from lights up to curtain call.

“The first thought after we read this script was: ​‘Oh my. That’s a lot of cooking,’” he said in an interview for WNHH radio’s ​“Kitchen Sync.”

Outlined in the script, the menu comprises chicken and gravy, rice and sweet potatoes, baked ham, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, and turnips, in addition to the macaroni and cheese, pound cake, and ambrosia. That’s more food than any one show at Long Wharf, including Shirley Valentine and Curse of the Starving Class, has featured. 

“If you think about actually cooking that in your home,” Alberino said, ​“that’s an all-day affair. So the first question we asked ourselves is: how do we create the illusion that these sisters are creating this entire meal in the short stage time, in the shortened length of the play?” 

The answer was coming up with ​“a system, a plan” that would allow the full meal to come to fruition before the end of the play. For the month-long run of the show, corners weren’t cut so much as rounded: The props team realized that vegetables could be peeled and chopped beforehand. For mac and cheese, a laborious béchamel sauce was replaced with cream of celery soup, poured in a saucepan before the show, while the pasta was cooked offstage, heated just enough to give off steam when a stagehand turned on the stove remotely.

But that was just the beginning. There were major sanitary concerns, for instance, in washing, drying, stuffing, and roasting a raw chicken onstage. That’s where Hennessey came in, building a silicone mold of a chicken with Prop Carpenter Jon Watanabe. Cutting corners a little?

“Maybe,” she said, but it brought the risk of onstage salmonella down to zero. Besides, she and Watanabe were thorough: the prop came out looking like a chicken, down to the mottled skin and glistening exterior.

“I was able to help Jon make the mold,” she said. ​“It was such a fun process, because not only was it a flexible rubber mold, there was also a hard outer mold to encase everything. It was amazing working with Jon to do this, because we were basically making it up on the fly.”

Then there was the issue of scent. Try as even the most devoted audience member might, Hennessey joked, they weren’t going to smell a silicone chicken. So she, Alberino, and others on the staff worked with Long Wharf’s tiny kitchen and dedicated run team to, on cue, roast small sections of chicken and ham to scent the theater each night.

So has it made them different eaters and consumers, at the end of the (very long) day?

“We’re very careful onstage to make sure that these two sisters, on stage, aren’t wasteful with anything,” Alberino said. ​“It has certainly made me … want to cook new things, and be more daring and more experimenting with what happens in my own kitchen.”

“Now I find myself going slightly more health conscious,” added Hennessey. ​“If I want to live as old as these ladies have, maybe I should be eating more vegetables.”

To listen to an interview with Hennessey and Alberino on WNHH radio’s ​“Kitchen Sync,” click on or download the audio above, or subscribe to our new ​“WNHH Arts Mix” podcast.