Murder on the Menu

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This article was published 26/02/2025 (545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Choosing where and what to eat can sometimes feel like a life or death decision.

Fate, the avant-garde, uber-exclusive restaurant served up by playwright Thomas Morgan Jones in Prairie Theatre Exchange’s latest stage concoction, takes the classic diner’s dilemma a step further by throwing a dash of poison into the spice rack.

“The story at Fate is that you pay $15,000 for the most high-end dinner you can ever have, but one in every 1,000 people who eat there are poisoned and killed,” explains director Jack Grinhaus, who was in the theatrical kitchen with Jones when the playwright first began taste-testing the elements that have now become A Killing at La Cucina: A Lucia Dante Mystery.

When Jones, who left his post as PTE’s artistic director last winter to begin a stint with the National Theatre School’s English playwriting program, had his first inklings of a noirish, black comedy with murder and martinis on the menu, it made sense to make Grinhaus his first call.

Not because the Toronto-born theatre artist was particularly dastardly, but because since 2022, he’s been calling the shots at Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre, an organization that specializes in mystery, where Hammett is treated with the same seriousness as Hamlet.

Grinhaus and Lauren Brotman, his wife and closest collaborator, have had success with darkened treatments of Hedda Gabler (Hedda Noir) and Gaslight, and both artists are thrilled by the ongoing expansion of the mystery genre, which is now tinged by the true-crime canon as much as it is by characters such as Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes or Jessica Fletcher.

“Genre gives you the opportunity to tell great stories in parable nature. Lauren has always said that in all of our work there is something important underneath. We love to bury the lede in a way, and let the audience see the story in a much more theatrical and entertaining way,” says Grinhaus.

In La Cucina, the death happens early when a leading food critic takes a fatal bite, leading the titular Dante (played by Brotman) to investigate the fallout.

A high-end detective unlikely to paint her name on the door in gold leaf, Dante wanders into the luxurious culinary world of Fate, where her co-star Braden Griffiths wears several hats, playing the chef, the dishwasher, an eccentric billionaire and a tech giant, among other roles.

“It’s a great show if you like sitting forward in your seat,” says the South Africa-born Brotman, whose artistic career began in earnest at five years old, sitting in theatres in Fort MacMurray, Alta., where her father, a longtime arts administrator, organized dance, theatre and music events for the community.

Understandably, Grinhaus and Brotman are cagey in discussing plot specifics, not wanting to spoil the entrée, but they say audiences can expect Jones’ script to abut the pixelated line between digital avatars and lived realities, calling into question the lasting implications of virtual life on actual death.

Dante, says Grinhaus, is crafted as an almost superheroic character, allowing one of the director’s favourite elements of the mystery genre to flourish.

“Genre theatre provides justice in a way that the real world sometimes doesn’t,” says Grinhaus, whose first stage performance as a child was as the evil plotter Haman in a Jewish day school version of the story of Purim.

“Sometimes, we come to the theatre because the bad guy is going to get theirs.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com