Is there a gentler, sweeter play hidden within Abigail Kileen and Rose Courtney’s expository adaptation of Karen Blixen’s (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen) short story Babette’s Feast, later adapted into Gabirel Axel’s 1987 Academy Award-winning Best Foreign Film? There might be if the authors hadn’t remained so puritanically faithful.
The original is soft and kind, like a Danish Our Town, where the mundane is elevated into the eternal. Kileen and Courtney quote verbatim from Blixen’s prose; they literally re-tell the short story, making every character an omniscient narrator. Instead of direct dialogue and action, the drama is conveyed second hand. It turns stilted and distanced. Disengaged from the story, we watch an audio book. Babette’s Feast isn’t written, it’s xeroxed.
There’s much exposition in the first half of this 90-minute piece, as we learn about the lives and habits of the congregation, father’s stoic convictions, the opera singer’s loss of purpose, the daughters’ past love lives, however brief and unrequited – all letter-perfect Blixen.
With its harsh Danish setting in the fjords near Berlevåg, one of many picturesque villages with brightly painted wooden houses, the yellow house of sisters Martine (Tracy Ahern) and Phillipa (Shondra Marie) is the refuge where French Communard Babette (a most radiant Luisa Menzen) flees from the 1871 Paris Commune uprising (think Les Miz). The sisters are pious Lutherans, who eschew all earthly pleasure in their devotion to God. This life is but an illusion as their sect awaits the next life in New Jerusalem. Though austere and strict, the sisters are regarded as “angels” in the community for their devotion to the poor and their many acts of charity.
With a letter of introduction from a former visitor to town, the French opera singer Achille Papin (Jeff McMorrough) who once tutored Phillipa and meant to sweep her off to the Paris Opera, this foreign outsider, Babette, a Catholic no less, with her tale of the death of her husband and son shot for revolutionists, melts the sister’s resolve, and she becomes their unpaid servant and cook. She is the very picture of gratitude and grace.
The sisters teach her the rudimentary techniques of the community’s traditional cooking, like the bread and ale soup, but Babette somehow ups the ante. Everyone in town clamors for her version. It’s the same, only better. The sect that their father the Dean (Joel Sandel) created is dying out, aging, losing its connection. The town is beginning to bicker, even to swear; the center will not hold. God works in mysterious ways, and Babette wins the French lottery with its prize of 10,000 francs, an enormous sum.
With the sister’s wish to honor their dead father’s 100th birthday, Babette subtly brow beats them into accepting her proposal to stage a feast that she will prepare – a real French dinner. At first, the sisters are aghast at having a foreign meal – frog legs, perhaps? – but Babette assures them that all will be well. Now that she is rich, she will pay for it. Skeptical, they can’t deny her selfless act of complete generosity and kindness toward their beloved father. The preparations begin. Crates of Parisian goods arrive at the port: expensive unpronounceable wines, a tortoise, caviar, Veuve Cliquot champagne, bottles of Amontillado, figs and candied cherries, cognac. This extravagant gluttony must be a sin, the stubborn villagers cry, the work of a witch; we will not praise the food.
But Babette’s exquisite feast changes everyone. Quarrels are forgiven, friends reconcile, old lovers reunited. Snow falls like a benediction. Babette reveals her secret: she was the chef at Paris’ most opulent restaurant, the Cafė Anglaise, whose patrons were royalists, politicians, theater stars, the elite. She transformed even her enemies into contented customers for she is an artist; and artists, even destitute as she now has become because of the feast, are never poor. (The epilogue is not written, but I bet Babette will soon open a restaurant in Berlevåg and make an even greater fortune.)
The cast is finely chosen, alternating through many roles except for Babette and the two sisters. (Austin Brady, Ali Dinkins, Anna Flynn, David LaDuca, round out the players.) Everyone plays their multiple parts well, but it’s Menzen who radiates deep warmth and natural grace as Babette, whether cooking in the kitchen or holding her own against the conventions of the town. She is her own quiet force of nature, exuding dignity and a forgiving, heartfelt loving peace.
Mark Lewis’ elemental setting of worn tables and chairs with miniature colored houses placed upon the cut-out mountain is appropriately stark, Donna Southern Schmidt’s costumes look hand spun, and lighting designer Jim Elliot has candlelight down pat. Director Marianne Savell moves everyone around elegantly, even when the script asks them to recite rather than react.
Babette’s Feast continues through October 4 at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 23, then 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Industry Night is 7:30 p.m. Monday, September 28. Mighty Acorn Productions at the MATCH, 3400 Main . For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit matchhouston.org. $30. Talkbacks with the director and cast immediately follow matinee performances Saturday, September 19 and 26; and Saturday, October 3.
