A team of public defenders forms a unique culinary group in Lunch Bunch (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
LUNCH BUNCH
122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 22, $10-$100
playco.org
In their 2006 study “The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization” published in Wiley InterScience, Elinor Ochs and Merav Shohet write, “Anthropologists have long considered ways in which food preparation, distribution, and consumption authenticate both social order and moral and aesthetic beliefs and values. Less frequently examined are the socialization processes that promote continuity and change across generations in the sociocultural life of food. . . . With this notion of cultural site in mind, mealtimes can be regarded as pregnant arenas for the production of sociality, morality, and local understandings of the world. Mealtimes are both vehicles for and end points of culture.”
Starting in childhood, all of us have experienced mealtime socialization, the good and the bad. At school, we might sit at the cool kids’ table or be left to sit alone, wondering why we’ve been ostracized. I remember when I started my first full-time job after college, I desperately wanted to be asked to join the group that went out for dollar grilled cheeses and shot pool once a week at lunch. Writer Sarah Einspanier and director Tara Ahmadinejad take the concept of the office lunch to a new level in Lunch Bunch, a delectable new collaboration between PlayCo and Clubbed Thumb extended through April 22 at 122CC.
The fifty-five-minute show — the running time just about matches the standard one-hour lunch break — was inspired by a real lunch group at the Bronx Defenders’ office, “a nonprofit that is radically transforming how low-income people in the Bronx are represented in the justice system and, in doing so, is transforming the system itself.” Lunch Bunch follows eight public defenders, five of whom use their daily shared lunch hour as a much-needed break from their heavy caseloads, trying to help their clients survive an unnecessarily complex system that too often separates children from parents.
Jacob (Ugo Chukwu) is the ersatz leader of the bunch, a serious gourmet who treats lunch as a way to approach culinary perfection. Only five employees at a time can participate in lunch bunch; each one is assigned a day to prepare lunch for the entire group. Initially, Tuttle (Louisa Jacobson) is Monday, Jacob is Tuesday, Hannah (Jo Mei) is Wednesday, Greg (Francis Mateo) is Thursday, and Tal (Janice Amaya) is Friday.
They prepare such superb fare as lemon tahini goddess noodles with tempeh “bacon” and garlic broccolini; spicy peanut soba noodles topped with shaved carrot and cucumber salad; lentil loaf with sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts; and BBQ jackfruit sandwich with side arugula pear salad. This is no casserole club.
Jacob (Ugo Chukwu) and Greg (Francis Mateo) talk about more than just lunch in PlayCo / Clubbed Thumb collaboration (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
However, Tal’s vacation to Paris and Tuttle’s conversion to the restrictive Whole30 diet means Jacob has two days to fill. He turns to a pair of new lawyers, Nicole (Julia Sirna-Frest) for Monday and Mitra (Tala Ashe) for Friday, bookending the week. While Mitra looks like she’ll fit in fine, it is clear that Nicole is going to be a problem for Jacob, who is aghast when he learns that Nicole does not know what a cast-iron is.
Over the course of several weeks, the lunch bunch enjoys four mouthwatering meals a week while agonizing over specific cases, complaining about certain judges, going for cries in the coat closet, and sharing tidbits about their personal lives. When Jacob says, “I’m not asking for a Michelin star. I’m asking for a four and a half star Yelp review,” he is essentially talking about more than just what’s for lunch, whether he realizes it or not.
“How do I say this?” the perennially uptight Jacob begins. “I have low ‘expectations,’ little ‘faith,’ when it comes to the law, government, organized religion, things that fall under the umbrella of ‘humanity’ and its ‘systems.’ And soooo, I seek my jollies, my ‘joy,’ my ‘bliss,’ what have you — some semblance of control — in this one area, this one ‘arena,’ of my existence.”
The more Zen-like Greg explains, “It’s about happiness, anxiety, boredom, chronic dissatisfaction, escalating expectations, fixation on achievement, our ultimate aloneness — basically, existential dread — really it’s about the fact that there’s no way our ‘affluent,’ ‘scientific,’ supposedly ‘sophisticated’ world is going to provide us with happiness, and that no matter how much energy we devote to its care the body will give out — eventually.”
At one point, a former lunch buncher named David (David Greenspan) walks past; he now works on the fourth floor but was thrown out of the group for considering pretzels a side dish. He delivers a wickedly delicious monologue that hearkens back to the Stone Age, well before there was anything like Top Chef.
Pain and pleasure intersect as things threaten to reach the boiling point, with Hannah’s eyelid growth getting bigger and Jacob ready to explode at any second.
Jean Kim’s shallow set features seven rolling desk chairs up against a long red wall; the characters sit facing it when they’re working and turn around when they talk to one another and eat. Alice Tavener’s costumes are workplace efficient and pitch-perfect, ranging from Jacob’s blue suit to Greg’s sweater and slacks, the women in well-tailored pants and sharp shoes. The lighting is by Oona Curley, with sound by Ben Vigus.
Mitra (Tala Ashe), Nicole (Julia Sirna-Frest), and Tuttle (Louisa Jacobson) take a break in Lunch Bunch (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
The cast forms a tight-knit unit, with sweet and savory performances by Chukwu as the insensitive Jacob, Ashe as the smart, sassy Mitra, Mateo as the keenly perceptive Greg, Jacobson as the goofy Tuttle, Amaya as the wacky Tal, Mei as the serious Hannah, Greenspan as the mysterious David, and Sirna-Frest as Nicole, who so wants to fit in at her new job, a feeling nearly all of us have had. Einspanier’s funny, barbed dialogue captures the drudgery of what it’s like to work in an office environment, while Ahmadinejad calmly stirs the pot as the tension mounts.
Lunch Bunch is reminiscent of Lynn Nottage’s 2021–22 Broadway play, Clyde’s, about a small group of ex-cons working at a roadside diner who each attempt to create the perfect sandwich, as if doing so would make their life meaningful and solve all their problems.
In the case of Lunch Bunch, it’s public defenders coming up with gourmet meals that could go a long way toward helping them believe they’re more than just cogs in a machine, caught up in an unwinnable game where people’s lives are at stake. Lunch success could also prevent these public servants from experiencing what happened to David, who remembers being “completely alone and . . . utterly defenseless.” The monologues are funny and often poignant, the dialogue deadpan hilarious, instantly relatable to anyone who’s ever worked in an office. Despite the generic, soul-deadening cubicle situation, the actors make the characters sparkle with uniqueness and verve — and somehow, humanity triumphs.
In the 1987 film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) declares, “Lunch is for wimps.” Studies have shown that more than sixty percent of office workers have their lunch alone at their desk, eating what the Atlantic calls “sadwiches.” The famous tumblr Sad Desk Lunch was an instant hit and is still going strong. Some claim that partaking of lunch with fellow employees can boost productivity, while others argue that eating with colleagues can lead to additional stress.
Lunch Bunch is not concerned about any of that data. Instead, it offers up a tasty mélange of lawyers seeking some solace from the everyday grind, using food as a way to lighten their heavy load as well as assert their individuality, rephrasing “You are what you eat” as “You are what you make.” But it turns out it’s not quite as simple as all that.