The First Rule of Supper Club

I’m sitting across from Willow Kean, actor, playwright, and novelist, in the brightly-lit dressing room at the LSPU Hall. It’s warm; a welcome change from the chilly fall day outside. We’re surrounded by stacks of plates, rows of glassware, little piles of cutlery, layers of placemats, and folded up cloth napkins. These are the sundries for an upcoming dinner party–well, five dinner parties, to be exact. 

Supper Club, a play written by and starring Kean, opens at the RCA mainstage this weekend. After Sunday, it will tour the island, playing at Arts & Culture Centres in Gander, Grand Falls-Windsor, Corner Brook, and Stephenville. 

Putting off a three-course meal for a group is an operational feat; putting off five of them in a traveling production that requires real food, presents a whole other set of challenges. Thankfully, there’s a full team supporting the show, including caterers who have to deal with some pretty strange requests. 

The play already had a successful first run. It was performed two years ago, during the pandemic’s earlier days which lent a show about dinner parties all the more significance. “We shared food on stage,” she says. “It felt so forbidden.” Back in 2020, “you’d be watching TV and you’d see people in a group, or holding hands, and you’d be like ‘oh my God!’ It was so shocking. I think that’s what it felt like at Supper Club for us.”

The social ritual of gathering and sharing a meal with friends and family still hasn’t lost its luster for Kean. “I never take it for granted now,” she says.

Back in November 2021, Supper Club was one of the first shows to be presented at full capacity at the Hall. Audience members were still masked, of course, but they were able to have an intermission, and the bar was open too. “We lucked into this beautiful pocket of normalcy,” Kean says, because a month later the province was in an extended lockdown. “I feel like the theatre gods were smiling on us!” 

Maybe they were, and still are. Dionysus, the Greek god of theatre, loved dinner parties. He was also the god of wine. He was long associated with the symposium too, a Greek banquet where people would eat, drink, and philosophize late into the night. 

Supper Club isn’t exactly a Dionysiac banquet, but Kean says, “I’m not going to lie, this play… is five ladies sitting around a dinner table and there’s wine involved. There may be some legal drugs involved as well. So some truths come out.” 

The show explores the relational dynamics that evolve between five women and food over the course of the dinners they take turns hosting.  

Getting back to the body

“I always wanted to do a play about food,” Kean tells me, “even though I hate eating on stage.” She admits the irony isn’t lost on her, or on the play’s director, Nicole Rousseau, “[she] makes fun of me all the time for it.”  

I immediately assume that Kean hates eating on stage because she’s self-conscious–but it turns out, that’s not it at all. Eating on stage is just complicated. “I’m a very, incredibly slow eater, so having to time-out eating on stage is really difficult,” she explains. 

“You have to make sure you don’t choke. You have to make sure everything is swallowed before you say your lines to make sure you’re not spitting food across the table or waiting to say your line with your mouth full.” She was stressed at first, but Kean admits she feels more relaxed about it now, thanks in large part to Rousseau, who ensured the cast practiced with food from day one. 

Each scene picks up at different stages of a meal; during dessert or halfway through the main course. This makes it easier on the actors who don’t have to actually eat five meals in their entirety. It does however, make things more complicated for the caterer.

During rehearsals, the actors use food like bread rolls and potato salad, trading duck for ready-made grilled chicken strips to get used to chewing different textures. For the desserts, they use applesauce and lots of pudding. 

“Sitting at the dining room table, Nicole’s like ok, what kind of pudding do you want? Butterscotch or chocolate or lemon meringue? Which is exciting until you get to the end of the two weeks and you’re like, ‘I never want to see pudding again.’” 

While an actor can have full command over their performance, ingesting food activates the body’s biological instincts in ways that are harder to control. Eating on stage creates a reality effect; the real intrudes into the fiction. It’s a small detail, but an equalizing one, a reminder that no matter who we pretend to be, we’re all just humans, grounded in our bodies and their functions. 

We shouldn’t have to be reminded of such a truth, but we’re living in troubled times. 

“I think it was getting Trump elected that set me off,” Kean explains, when I ask her what prompted her to write Supper Club in the first place. “I was like, ‘I need to write something funny and it needs to be about women.’” 

A seat at the table, a space on the stage

Kean wanted to create a space for women of all ages to just be, to connect with themselves and each other through the mutual enjoyment of food and laughter. “You know, you’re an actor, and you’re a woman, and you’re a certain age–things are getting better–but the parts do start to dry up on stage and on screen.” 

Rousseau says something that’s always stuck with her, she adds. “For far too long, middle-aged women on stage have been depicted as prim or unfulfilled or unhappily aging.’ I wanted to take that and turn it on its head.” 

Kean notes that people really had a strong reaction during the show’s first run. “I had a lot of women, middle aged women, leave and say, ‘thank you for that, thank you, it was good to see some reality on stage,’ which I was very happy with.” 

Though the play is mostly about women hanging out, eating, drinking, and talking, Kean insists Supper Club is for everybody. “We had a lot of men come see the show too…who maybe got dragged by their wives but ended up having a great time.” 

She’s certain that anyone who liked the movie Bridesmaids will enjoy the show. Bridesmaids, if you remember, is the raunchy comedy penned by Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumolo. It revolves entirely around a friendship between two women. It was a box office hit when it opened in 2011—a sign that funny women had finally broken the so-called “crass ceiling.” 

Supper Club was written in the same spirit: it combines the complexities of interpersonal women relationships with humour, and adds food.  “It’s a comedy, it’s crude, it’s about women just being themselves,” Kean says. “Me and Nicole like to joke you can take your nan if she’s saucy. If you’ve got a saucy nan, this is her cup of tea.”

Kean drew inspiration from her own experience being part of a supper club. Her roommate was the one who invited her into the fold. “Basically the rule was you take a turn hosting a dinner party: appetizer, main course, dessert. You could cook, you could order in, or you could bring somebody in to cook for you and your friends. And it just kind of went from there.” The dinners happened once a month usually, with months off for Christmas and summer. 

She didn’t really know anyone there at first. Now, after more than a decade, “we’re all great friends,” she says. She’s quick to point out that while the characters in the play are not based on the women from her club, they are inspired by her affection for them. 

“I wanted to write a bunch of women I’d want to hang out with” she explains. The characters in question range in ages, from 20s to 50s, and come from different backgrounds. Their standing supper club dates are what they have in common; they coax them together, creating opportunities for both connection and conflict. 

Table manners

I ask Kean if she thinks there’s something about the dinner table that sets the stage for such developments. When you’re settled in for the night, she replies, “there is something safe about the table that allows you to say things you wouldn’t normally say.” The dinner table can also be very captivating too. “I’m sure you’ve been at dinner parties where you could go to the living room, but everyone just sits around the table from appetizer to dessert to coffee to your aperitif or whatever… until two in the morning… chatting.” 

What happens at the dinner table is clearly much more than food consumption. For philosopher Albert Borgmann, preparing and enjoying a meal is a cultural practice that engages all of our senses and holds our attention in manifold ways. He saw the communal eating and drinking that happens over shared gestures, gazes, and dialogue, as fundamental to the human experience of being. “In the simplicity of bread and wine, of meat and vegetable, the world is gathered,” he wrote. 

Bringing the primal and the cosmic together in this way might be necessary for our thriving, but it’s not always possible, or pleasant.“We’ve all been at those family dinners!” Kean says, “you know, somebody brings up–it could be anything in this climate.” It’s hard not to get political at the dinner table. Especially, Kean says, because “food is always political.”

“One interesting thing that I wanted to tackle when I wrote the play,” she adds, is “the juxtaposition of people who have grown up in different ways. How their way of being brought up has affected the way they look at food.” 

She references two of the play’s characters, one a new Canadian who grew up food-insecure in Cuba, and the other, a young Canadian woman who is vegan. “It’s an interesting thing writing a character who’s grown up having to eat what’s put in front of her as opposed to a character who has the luxury and the privilege of being able to choose.” Kean is less interested in critiquing one or the other in the play, and more interested in showing how eating food isn’t just personal–it’s relational and contextual too. 

Kean recounts a memory from years ago: “I was with Jill Kielley and Robert Chafe and we were at my nan’s cabin for supper.” Kielley was a vegetarian at the time, and to Kean’s dismay, her grandmother had made pork chops. “‘Oh my god, Jill, I’m so sorry!’” Kean had whispered. Jill, for her part, was totally cool about it. She said, “I’m going to eat the pork chops–it’s your nan!”

What we talk about when we talk about food

By the end of my conversation with Kean, it’s clear that when we talk about food, we’re really talking about relationships. And that seems to be at the heart of Supper Club too–Kean and Rousseau have been friends for nearly 30 years. “Some of the best food of my life I’ve eaten with her,” Kean confesses. “So it was only fitting that she was the person who had to direct the show about food and friendship.” 

She tells me about a character in the play who says, “you can’t enjoy food with others unless you can enjoy it by yourself. Cooking a meal for yourself is an act of love–for yourself.” Love is created and sustained through such regular practices and structures of care, much like the standing dinner date a supper club provides.

If you get the chance to see the play, I can’t say for sure it will provide an escape from reality, but it will provide an opportunity to reflect on the better parts of it–the ones worth holding onto, the ones we must not—should not—be living without.

Supper Club plays at the LSPU Hall in St. John’s October 27-28, followed by a matinee on October 29. It will tour the island from November 1-9. For details, check the Arts & Culture Centre nearest you.