The marvelous Meanwhile Park outdoor theatrical venue in a neighborhood close to Liberty Park will be the perfect spot for Matthew Ivan Bennett’s newest play, the rom-com A French Toast, which opens next week. The four characters in the play are staying at À Côté du Palais, a small bed and breakfast in the south of France.
Bennett’s script is full of sunny humor but, of course, he also inflects it properly with his trademark set of insatiable intellectual curiosities. Take Yasmin, for example. A Black British lesbian, she meets Cassie, a White American who also is lesbian and is traveling with her mother, Lucy, a heartbroken Mormon who just witnessed the marriage of her ex-husband to his gay partner. Cassie is intrigued by Yasmin’s intellect. While she dabbles in Old French, Yasmin, whose forte actually is Old English, wrote her dissertation on the “epistemic violence in Beowulf.” Amid their flirtatious banter, Yasmin corrects Cassie on a few points, which seems to attract Cassie’s attention even more.
The point is that once again, Meanwhile Park, for its fifth juried Playwright Prize which was selected from more than 275 submissions from across the country, has landed on the sort of summer theater that can entice even the most performative, high-browed intellectual to revel in a genre that often borders on flighty saccharine and occasionally incredulous premises in, for instance, Hallmark and Lifetime channel made-for-television movies. In all seriousness. Yasmin surprises Cassie when she talks about her appreciation for, in Cassie words, Hallmark’s “cheesy rom-coms at Christmas.”
Ripening beautifully in his writing game, Bennett, who also won the inaugural Meanwhile Park Playwright Prize in 2023 for From June to August, cleverly inserts the reference to Victoria Nelson’s award-winning book The Secret Life of Puppets (2001). Nelson appreciated pop culture’s transcendental value and she said in a podcast interview hosted by the Harvard Divinity School, “that’s when I got this whole notion of the sub zeitgeist, the slightly less respectable underbelly of mainstream intellectual culture.” The character of Yasmin in A French Toast mirrors Nelson’s sentiments. Again, Nelson from that same interview: “Had I actually gone back to school to get a Ph.D., I don’t think I could have gotten away with anything, like what I wrote in The Secret Life of Puppets. And so I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful that I didn’t try to do it the regular way.”…