Onstage Colorado: A moveable confection: ‘The Pâstisserie’ is a wondrous treat Oct 8, 2023

The high-paced physical comedy from Theatre Artibus is unlike anything else on stage locally By Alex Miller

https://www.onstagecolorado.com/a-moveable-confection-the-pastisserie-is-a-wondrous-treat/

Theatre Artibus’s new production The Pâstisserie achieves the theatrical trifecta of being a wonderful concept performed beautifully and delivering something truly unique and delightful. With just three performers, a spare set and 60 minutes’ run time, the show dives deep into one particular human emotion — nostalgia — in a highly physical performance that never stands still.

Created by Tiffany Ogburn, Buba Basishvili, Meghan Frank and Nicole Dietze — and performed by the first three — The Pâstisserie is a pastiche of circus, mime, shadow theatre and comedy that goes places rarely seen in Colorado theatre. Starting in blackout with only a flashlight guiding the initial action, the show grabs you from the get-go with the best question ever: What the hell is this?

As the title suggests, the action takes place in a pastry shop where the sole product is a wrapped confection derived from the memories of the workers. Frank and Ogburn are the only employees, and the first part of their process is to find —or perhaps capture — others from whom they can extract the crucial ingredient. With a nod to the fact that the very word nostalgia was coined to describe a particular type of homesickness experience by troops, their first subject is a very confused soldier named Fred Whipple (Basishvili). Before long, he’s shed his uniform and is part of the crew — zooming about on wheeled chairs and tables as he learns the ropes with the two women.

In addition to mining nostalgia for sentimental reasons, the show also points toward some of the more unsavory ways it can be exploited for commercial and political gain. At one point the concept of war itself is transmogrified into a chocolate that the trio finds utterly disgusting.

Staged in The Savoy Denver (show up early for the craft cocktails!), the setup is similar to that of a basketball game where the audience is on either side of a large, empty performance area. All set pieces are on wheels, including the Wonka-esque contraption that turns the extracted memories into what looks like a petri dish of material that’s then taken to the worktables for processing. But there’s another important area behind some scrim panels where a lot of shadow work takes place. Here, the memories are extracted using a vacuum-like device, and there’s a lot more inventive use of the shadow technique to give the show yet another layer of visual complexity.

There isn’t a great deal of dialogue in The Pâstisserie — only enough to fill in where movement cannot tell the whole story — and as such the accompanying sound does a lot of heavy lifting. The music composed by David Rynhart is an integral component to the production, and it’s hard to overstate just how well it’s paired to the action. Nicely mirroring much of the show’s dreamlike state, the music is a constant presence that’s also perfectly timed to the highly fluid action. Simple but effective lighting design by Sean Mallary is also key to drawing focus and establishing mood.

Once the factory is in full swing, the story moves in a type of fugue state, where the industrial processes comically repeat themselves and result in varying results depending on the ingredients. The characters swap roles, with the two women taking turns as the mustachioed and pompous plant foreman while the other plays the part of the beleaguered worker. And while this is very much an ensemble performance, each player does nice work establishing their characters as they morph and reset again and again.

As a dark comedy with a lot of comic elements, The Pâstisserie gives one plenty to think about both during and after the performance. I walked out of The Savoy thinking I’d just seen something I hadn’t really seen before. Unlike many thought-provoking plays where I was mulling over the plot, with The Pâstisserie I was marveling at how well this story was told with movement.

As such, this piece may have more in common with a ballet than a play. With many scripts being overstuffed with dialogue, the Artibus crew demonstrates how to go about it with a stripped-down book packed with elements borrowed from other performance arts. It’s a joyous and magical production that’s a true breath of fresh air onstage in Denver.