Review: "Cemetery Soup" Is Seasoned Perfectly with the Surreal

Cemetery Soup

Written and directed by Jess Barbagallo

Presented by Adult Film + Theatre and The Brick Theater at The Brick Theater

579 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NYC

July 31-August 9, 2025

The title of Jess Barbagallo's new play, Cemetery Soup, points to the tension and continuity between dying and living that the show suggests as well as an image of heterogenous mélange (both in the assemblage of distinct individuals in a graveyard and ingredients in a soup) that reflects not only the show's narrative but also living itself. With the graveyard as a kind of central node, Cemetery Soup presents a web of characters, human and otherwise, whose interconnections are continually and overwhelmingly, if to different degrees, in flux. One character's invocation of Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, gazing back upon the wreckage of the past while irresistibly impelled into the future, might serve as shorthand for their condition–the condition of the living (who are also in some sense also the dying). If this Soup's stock consists of a pervasive, deadpan hilarity, the show also stirs in moments of compelling poignancy and sharp meta-theater that heighten its already impressive flavor.

JB (Jordan Baum), whose name evokes the initials of both actor Baum and playwright Barbagallo and who acts as a sort of emcee in evening wear, repeatedly reminds the audience that, should they continue to watch the play, they must "take the living with the dying." He also, and not unrelatedly, at one point advises spectators to "beware the trap of causality"--as another character, Jester (Spencer Cramer), puts it, "anything can happen at any time," an assertion as true regarding the play as regarding the play's picture of existence. Before we meet either of these characters, we are introduced to Carolyn (Emma Goode) and her dog, Boot (Sasha Gheesling) in an opening scene partly narrated, and simultaneously acted out in miniature, by Gravestone (Spencer Cramer), a gravestone with a humorously declarative style of speaking. Boot, enticed by the siren song of the cemetery's grass (Addie Guidry), who tempts her with ideas of freedom, digs under the cemetery fence and is lost to Carolyn. In her search for Boot, Carolyn meets the generally silent Mickey (Sasha Gheesling), who shares a recently deceased friend and a fraught relationship with Jester. Jester has his own, elderly dog, Tilly (Emma Goode), and an often-long-distance relationship with Mikey (Addie Guidry), who identifies herself as Mickey's nemesis and, in her search for quiet, enjoys being alone and eating thermoses of soup in the cemetery. Mikey strikes up a friendship with Gravestone, who is subsequently threatened with removal by the cemetery groundskeeper (Rich Carrillo), while, as an actor, Jester's path crosses with those Carolyn, working as a talent scout on a project with her quasi-womanizing friend Willie (Rich Carrillo) that has some clear similarities to Cemetery Soup.

As much as literal death figures in the play, it is also relations (and self-definitions) that live and die, or simply transform, part of the change driven by the inescapable passage of time. Jester, at one moment of significant change, argues that lived time cannot be wasted–there is just too little of it; and some endings here are also beginnings, including for Gravestone and Boot. Boot's and Tilly's consciousnesses are wonderfully realized in passages of abbreviated but vivid English in a fantastic script that expertly blends the grounded and the absurd (a carrot, for instance, features in a quite unexpected way in one marvelously weird moment). Unfailingly creative staging and uniformly superb, assured performances from a cast who, the very funny Baum excepted, all play multiple roles, in most cases both human and non-human. In a particularly moving scene with Cramer and Goode, Jester talks about how an other/Other can become part of one's "I," and that all the inconveniences and frustrations that come with that process are worth it. This proposition resonates throughout a play that also has JB ask us to think about what stories we trust. Cemetery Soup is further evidence that Adult Film should be high on that list.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards