Guest Blog: Road to Opening STORYBORSCHT

By Charlie Varon

I've never cooked in a kitchen this loud. Huge burners breathe and hiss. Exhaust fans roar. "Despacito" is playing on the radio, but can't really compete with the industrial noises. I'm making borscht - hot Russian borscht with beets, cabbage, tomatoes, onion and dill - for the 20 people who have bought tickets to the first brunch of my new show, Charlie Varon's STORYBORSCHT at The Marsh Café through October 29.

The brunch is on Sunday morning. I'm cooking today, because that's when the catering kitchen could fit me into their schedule. Or thought they could. A last-minute request has come in from a couple planning a wedding - they want to do a "tasting" that afternoon, the catering equivalent of an audition.

So while I prepare my peasant borscht, Chef Leo is whipping up dish after haute cuisine dish: cod is being seared, baby ribs braised, dumplings pinched. Fritters are bubbling. Chef moves fast, and I'm trying to stay out of his way. It is his kitchen, his domain.

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I hadn't planned to become a pop-up chef.

Since the early 1990s I've been writing solo plays and performing them at The Marsh in San Francisco. I've been blessed with a strong local following and critics who've met my work halfway. Some of my shows, like Rush Limbaugh in Night School and Rabbi Sam, became long-running hits, and have been produced in other cities.

Then, six years ago, I began writing a book of fictional short stories. The subjects of the stories are old Jews living in a retirement home in San Francisco, and the project is a love letter to my parents and their generation of American Jews.

My goal was never just to write a book. I also wanted to put the stories on stage. But how? I experimented first with Feisty Old Jew, a wild tale about a curmudgeon who goes surfing for the first time in his life at age 83. I didn't do much adaptation; I just performed the hell out of the story, and the audience loved the ride.

The next story, Second Time Around, was more inward and poignant, the tale of a 92-year-old World War II bomber pilot who's estranged from his son. For that piece, I spent a year collaborating with the renowned cellist / composer Joan Jeanrenaud and my long-time director David Ford, adapting the story into a duet for cello and storyteller. Our performances were a cross between theater and chamber music.

But this story, Back in the World, was perhaps the hardest piece to put on stage. The story occurs largely in the mind of its protagonist, 84-year-old Adele, as she struggles with jealousy and anxiety. I spent eight months exploring strategies to stage the story. I tried interspersing recorded snippets of popular songs, marching band music, and even rewriting the piece to include breakouts in rhymed couplets. None of it worked. None of it was anything I would want to subject an audience to.

Then my friend and publicist Carla Befera invited me to do a reading of Back in the World in her home. She made dinner, and we alternated "courses" of food and story. Something magical happened. The intimacy of the setting matched the intimacy of the story.

The title came to me the next day. I would call the event STORYBORSCHT. I've been cooking hot Russian borscht for years. It's my specialty. It's comfort food for me; it's also what I bring to friends who are ill or down. The borscht is - in the words of one friend - "revivifying."

STORYBORSCHT. I would cook, I would perform, I would host.

And the venue would be not The Marsh itself, but the small café adjacent to our theater on Valencia Street.

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There was another impulse that led me to STORYBORSCHT - a sense I've had for a few years now that live performance needs to reinvent itself in the digital age. Put most harshly, the question I ask is: "If people can watch any movie or TV show ever made, virtually for free, without having to get out of their pajamas, and they can pause it to go to the toilet, or stop watching entirely if they get bored, why should they ever leave home, look for parking, and risk being infected by other people's germs, to see something they may not end up liking?"

Sometimes I ask the question the other way around: "What is the hunger for communal experience that no screen will ever satisfy?"

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On Sunday morning the health inspector comes by at 10am. He tests the temperature of the borscht and approves. He checks out the 3-compartment sink and says yes, we can use ceramic bowls and metal spoons instead of disposables. He issues us a temporary food permit and wishes us good luck. At 11am we open the door to the café, and the people lined up on the sidewalk begin filing in. I welcome them in my apron, lead them to the appetizers, and begin the next chapter in my artistic life.

For more information about Charlie Varon's STORYBORSCHT, please visit themarsh.org.

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