NEW YORK, NY.- Abe Koogler didnt grow up going to many restaurants. He was raised on Vashon Island, Washington sparse and bucolic with an artsy populace, a few miles southwest of Seattle in a house without a TV, where meals were mostly eaten at home, his free time spent fashioning handmade puppets onto chopsticks.
So when he moved to New York, a city with restaurants on virtually every corner, he found the hustle and bustle of Manhattans highbrow establishments fascinating.
Living in New York, you walk by all these highly curated, beautiful, warm spaces where people are in the middle of this intense culinary experience, Koogler said on a rainy afternoon in midtown. And I like looking at these windows and imagining what its like for the people inside.
A lot of it is being fascinated and not knowing why, he added.
Koogler, 39, is known for his darkly comedic plays about labor-intensive jobs in, for example, package inventory centers and slaughterhouses. Works about work. His latest, Staff Meal, about a beloved restaurant with a mysterious owner, has a similar setting (much of the story takes place in the prepping of food and serving of drinks) but with a notable diversion from his previous productions: Here is a job where the employees enjoy their work. In fact, they revere it.
The restaurants culture of veneration for food, wine and care-taking nods to Danny Meyers hospitality manifesto, Setting the Table, and although the play, which opens April 28 at Playwrights Horizons, begins as a familiar meet-cute, it progressively gets weirder and weirder, said the shows director, Morgan Green.
After first reading the script, she wondered, How the hell do you stage it? I was really excited about this down-the-rabbit-hole feeling, she said, and about mapping out that trajectory.
In Staff Meal, Koogler creates a world somewhere between front and back of house, where food is a portal and service an art. Meanwhile, patrons navigate apocalyptic events outside the restaurant, where the future appears increasingly fragile.
It really feels like were on the same page in building this world, Green said. His trust makes me feel like I can be creative in response to what hes written.
Koogler started writing Staff Meal in January 2020 in New York and finished the play three months later in a cabin in the woods. He had taken refuge from the citys chaos with his now-fiancee, Luca Shapiro, in the Berkshires. Deep into the pandemics early lonely days and isolated from the world, he desperately missed the citys amenities, especially its restaurants.
But he was accustomed to living in and creating from remote wilderness. His childhood home in the middle of Puget Sound was a breeding ground for imagination.
Growing up, Koogler, the middle child of three boys, didnt have a lot of friends and wasnt skilled at sports, he said. He spent his time wandering in the woods and crafting marionettes and Muppet-inspired felt puppets. He starred as Gandalf in a possibly bootleg production of The Hobbit. His second grade teacher let him adapt Little Red Riding Hood.
It took a lot of classroom time, he said with a quiet laugh. I was pretty specific about what I wanted them to do.
Living on an island meant he eventually took the ferry to Seattle for school. During his commute, hed peer over the sides to observe the octopuses gliding through the crest. Some days the boat would stop for orcas to pass (a ritual that inspired his last work, Deep Blue Sound).
Ample time for fantasy and boredom were a recipe for artistry.
Though he grew up writing and performing in plays, he didnt set out to create a career in the theater at least, not the kind with a proscenium.
Electoral politics in the United States is very much a performance, said Koogler, who studied political science at Yale. Working on a political campaign is like putting up a play.
He dabbled in performance as an undergraduate, but one of his first jobs after college was as an assistant campaign manager of a California State Assembly race.
It wasnt long, though, before he returned to theater.
When I contemplated a career in the political world, I felt like there was something missing, Koogler said. Its very rational; its straightforward. And Ive always been interested in the subconscious, in dream life and sort of the wilder and more mysterious forces at work in the world.
In pursuit of dream life, he moved to New York in 2007 to study acting at the William Esper Studio, but he soon realized he was too shy to be an actor and began to take playwriting classes.
I felt constrained and limited in my ability to be creative when it was my physical body up onstage, he said. What I found when I was writing was that I just had this incredible freedom.
Chasing that freedom led to an MFA in playwriting at the University of Texas, Austin, where he made experimental theater and wrote Kill Floor, about an ex-convict who works at a cattle slaughterhouse, and then to a playwriting fellowship at Juilliard, during which Kill Floor was staged in 2015 at Lincoln Center Theater.
Writing for The New York Times, theater critic Charles Isherwood called the show a well-acted, low-key drama that never strikes a false or strained note.
Two years later came Fulfillment Center, a Manhattan Theater Club production centered on lonely connection-seekers who work at a mail-order shipping facility in New Mexico. Critic Ben Brantley called the show, which later won Koogler an Obie Award for playwriting, quietly shattering.
His work is subtle and nuanced and it creeps up on you, Eboni Booth, an actor and a playwright who starred in Fulfillment Center, said, adding that Koogler transmits to words a constant wrangling with the self.
And in there is so much freedom to be a messy person, she said.
In each of his plays, time is stretched out over mundane work, with the perils of capitalism on full display.
Ive always been interested in power, in who has it and who doesnt have it, Koogler said.
That undercurrent has become his signature throughline. But in Staff Meal, the tone shifts. The hard edges of work soften into pleasure.
After so many years of writing about difficult, harmful workplaces, he said, I wanted to write about a beautiful place that people love showing up to every day.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.