Trash Cuisine NYC Reviews and Tickets

"While there are moments where the specificity of this juxtaposition - between delicacy and degradation, daily and deadly - is lost a bit for the sake of a bigger impression - of isolation, willful ignorance - it all is still unnerving. It is a visceral, striking chord, as violence and this same sort of strange irony is not unfamiliar to our own country..."
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"Devised with great inventiveness, performed with constant dynamism and argued with a ruthless integrity, 'Trash Cuisine’s' few flaws are easily forgiven. It’s a stomach turning indictment of capital punishment that seems to make the eyes of God burn fiercer on the world."
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"When it works, it’s mesmerically upsetting...But the show lacks focus, with some sections totally misfiring, while the humour feels forced. And the exact overall intent is a little hazy...'Trash Cuisine’ is a somewhat arbitrary, oddly un-immediate parade of atrocities from the last 40 years, with no clear message beyond offering an incomplete reflection of humanity at its worst...It’s a fierce and fascinating evening, but a spot more dramaturgy wouldn’t go amiss."
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"The purpose of the show is to remind us that we live in a world where conspicuous consumption co-exists with state torture...The severity of the show's content, however, is counterpointed by the grace, athleticism and skill of its performers and by the sweetness of accompanying music. Once again, Belarus Free Theatre prove their capacity to stir our consciences through their sensuous theatricality."
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"Suddenly it stopped being theater and started to become its own form of torture. 'Trash Cuisine' oscillates between promulgating powerful images through physical theater and aggressively underlining their political points with the use of sound and smells. This is theater that actually reaches out from the stage to hit you in the face. Subtle it is not. But it is political theater that remains both elegant and evocative."
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"The overarching concept, a mad skit set in a Capital Punishment Café with its “dishes” of worldwide human rights abuses, is inadequate and the tenuous linking culinary metaphor swiftly gives up the fight. Violations interspersed with recipes — plus some injudiciously selected passages from Shakespeare — are a queasy-making mixture and there is much that’s bewildering."
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"This piece is fiercely disciplined and, as a result, continually hits its chosen targets with pinpoint accuracy...Agitprop has rarely seemed more palatable or effective than this powerfully moving piece of political theatre. It isn't always comfortable to watch but anyone who believes in freedom of speech and the civilisation of society will find this production deeply moving."
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"'Trash Cuisine' sees this brave company lose much of both its defiant playfulness and its authority.So much of the work on show here has been done before and better...The Free Theatre themselves have visited this performance territory before. The final sequence of the (overlong) 100-minute piece entails chopping up industrial quantities of onions; the company may, I suppose, be parodying themselves and recognising their need to elicit our tears artificially."
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