On Love, Fried Chicken, and Aubrey Plaza
A Review of 2 Broadway Plays and 1 West Village Restaurant
I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times,
When I’m eating fried chicken,
When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,
When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,
The various blood debts you owe me,
My past humiliations and my future crimes —
Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.
— Linh Dinh
Months ago I was stricken with the imperative to see Aubrey Plaza in the off-Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. Quickly descending into self-indulgence, I planned a date for myself that included a 2pm performance of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate at the Hayes Theatre, dinner at Bird Dog in the West Village, and the ultimate event at the Lucille Lortel Theatre at 7:30pm.
Then, the morning of January 6th, I left my apartment in Philly to catch the 10:30am Amtrak up to Manhattan. As I sat quietly on the Market Frankford line heading toward 30th Street Station a couple boarded at 15th Street. He wheeled a suitcase to the side of the filthy train car and took a seat. She sat down, looked behind her to make sure no one was watching — I had been staring off at some other thing — removed his mask, and kissed him. This was not the kiss of a couple long-loved. It was desperate and sensual. I averted my gaze a bit longer while they continued to make out.
They disembarked at 30th Street, which was predictable given the suitcase. They walked left so I walked right, having incidentally seen them so vulnerable out of my peripheral vision. I boarded my train to New York thinking of times I’ve felt that kind of fiery, torrid love. That deep-in-your-bones yearning for a person who is right in front of you.
Based on prior reviews and synopses, I knew this type of love to be the subject of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.
To see Plaza — known for her deadpan, if not purposely awkward comedic delivery — in such an intimate dramatic role demanded curiosity.
I got to Penn Station at noon, still time to kill before Appropriate at 2pm. I stopped at the Red Flame Diner based on its proximity to the Hayes Theatre and ordered pastrami on rye and a tomato juice. I sipped a green tea to stall as I waited for doors at 1:30pm, not wanting to go back outside into the harsh New York winter. The bill was just over $20 before tip. The sandwich was fine. For this close to Times Square, I have no complaints. I walked two blocks to the theater.
Appropriate is the story of a deeply dysfunctional family trying perilously to grapple with the estate of their patriarch. Sarah Paulson leads with a powerful and audacious performance of the embittered daughter, Toni Lafayette. During the quicker-than-you-think 2 hour 30 minute runtime, Paulson reaches deeply into every human emotion, but calls on exasperated acridity most of all.
Set squarely in the South to the call of cicadas, Appropriate deals with the harsh realities of southern history from a stage in New York City. This might invite a disconnect or be cause for concern at the graphic language and allusions to white supremacy if not for the honest presentation and the earnestness of the cast. As she set out in a recent interview for Garden and Gun magazine, Paulson herself is a southerner who seeks only to portray truth:
“It’s not my job to determine whether [my roles] are likable or worthy people,” she explains, adding that for her, it’s more. “Can I go home at night and feel that I attempted to do something with truth at its center? And if I did, that’s enough.”
It cannot be said that Paulson’s Toni is a likable or worthy person. She is crude and too much like her father. Jesse Green, writing for The New York Times, called Paulson’s Toni “the burned-out core of a nuclear family reactor, taking no prisoners and taking no blame.” It is, however, an honest portrayal.
Across from Paulson is Corey Stoll as the serious, practical, and business-minded brother of Paulson’s Toni, Bo (short for Beauregard Lafayette). At times likable and at times too un-southern, Bo’s interplay with Toni is central to this family drama with regular and dark comedic twists. It is not always obvious when audience laughter is called for given the dark nature of the material, but there are nevertheless several hilarious laugh breaks.
The youngest of the 3 siblings, Franz, is a ne’er-do-well with a harsh and hushed past played by Michael Esper. The play opens to Franz sneaking into his family’s aging plantation with his too-young fiancé, River.
River, a crunchy granola-type, has significant interplay with Paulson’s Toni. Elle Fanning is the original River in this production, but the below had been slipped into my Playbill:
As Fanning did a fantastic job starring in and co-producing Hulu’s “The Great,” a raucous comedy sort of about Catherine the Great, I had hoped to see her as River. In fact, Fanning’s absence coincided with her attendance at the 2024 Golden Globes, where she was nominated for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Musical or Comedy Series for her role in “The Great.” Her understudy, Mia Sinclair Jenness, who has been performing on Broadway since she was quite young, fit into the role well.
Ultimately Appropriate is a story of storge — familial love — and the binds that by chance but forever hold us to our parents and to our siblings. On full display at the Hayes Theatre from 2pm until almost 5pm on January 6, 2023, the sometimes grotesque but ever-strong bond between even the most estranged siblings transcends time and protects from interlopers.
After the actors bowed to a standing ovation, I headed out into the developing nor’easter now dropping wet snow all over Broadway and Times Square. I got on the Downtown E headed toward 4th Street and my 5:30pm reservation for 1. The reservation for 1 is an exercise in philautia — self-love. It is an exercise I have described, in my mildly unhinged tale of three nights in New Orleans entitled “Notes From an Early Midlife Crisis,” as “romantic solitude.” It is an exercise necessary to any semblance of self-respect and -esteem.
This exercise took place at a cozy — tiny even — restaurant in the West Village, Bird Dog. Bird Dog presents itself as a southern restaurant focusing on hand-made pasta. A southern restaurant in New York City raises immediate interest and skepticism. It brings to mind the 1990’s Pace Picante Salsa ad campaign wherein cowboys in Texas discover they have been handed unopened salsa made in NYC and collectively, appalled, yell “New York City?!”
However, Bird Dog comes by it honestly. Executive Chef Brian Cartenuto, two-time Cutthroat Kitchen winner and former Executive Chef to a number of restaurants, including Anthony Bourdain’s Brasserie, acquired many of his culinary skills as a chef in Florida making southern comfort food. When Sarah Paulson was asked if her native Florida counts as “the south” for her interview in Garden and Gun, she exclaimed “It freaking does.”
I was seated at the three-stool bar for the first of Bird Dog’s three nightly seatings. I was given a rundown of the menu by a smiling man wearing all black except for his white beanie.
“We’re an Italian meets southern food restaurant,” he explained, “like if the Sopranos went to Talladega.”
I ordered a Montepulciano sourced from a woman-owned sustainable vineyard. While that sentence might sound pretentious, equity and sustainability in food and drink is nothing to be scoffed at when it is made available.
I looked over the menu. They offer either a 3 course prix fixe menu for $65 or a fried chicken dinner for $55. They also offer a chef’s tasting menu for $95, but — being my own date — that was impractical. My server explained that the fried chicken is first brined in iced tea, then brined in honey butter. An unusual and almost comically southern preparation, but damn it sounded good. I opted for the 3 course meal and chose the burrata, the stuffed shells, and — obligatorily — the fried chicken.
I am not a New Yorker. Nor am I a southerner. Rather, I am a man altogether untethered by region. Spending most of my life in the midwest and nearly a decade in Philly, I cannot tell you if a southern restaurant in New York “gets it right,” just as I cannot fairly tell you whether Appropriate adequately captured the struggle to face honest southern history. I only know what I like and what is right for me.
I overheard my server describe himself as a “big southern boy” to a table that had just been sat as I sipped my Montepulciano. I sat back in my bar stool and let the philautia begin to set in. I looked up at the walls adorned with pictures of dogs in stately clothes, reflecting on my visits to see family in Tennessee as a child. This place was a hell of a lot fancier than the Pic-a-Rib we used to eat at in Clarksville. I was reminded of the stark differences between the two as my burrata hit the bar counter.
Served over dates, almonds, and broccoli rabe, the burrata was as good as I had hoped it might be. A big ball of cheese is always pleasing, and always pairs well with red wine.
As I ordered another glass of red the stuffed shells hit the bar. A steaming skillet of hand-made shells a la vodka stuffed with ricotta, this was a rich and decadent pasta dish. I cut the shells with a fork and knife so the plentiful vodka sauce — now mixing with the cheese into a cream — wouldn’t spill over the edges of the skillet. As I sipped my Italian wine and ate my ostensibly Italian pasta dish, I began to wonder if anything was actually southern about the way I had ordered my prix fixe dinner.
Then the fried chicken came out. Served brown and crisp, slathered with hot sauce and topped with chives, served over white bread with house made half-sour pickle slices on the side, this eccentrically brined piece of meat was a masterwork. Simple yet painstakingly prepared. Paired with the house Chardonnay, the first bite made abundantly clear that it was the best fried chicken I had ever eaten, and perhaps the best fried chicken I will ever eat. My only regret is that I did not order it for all three courses.
In that moment of pure unadulterated philautia I thought of nothing but the fried chicken. I thought not about work, I thought not about pain, I thought not about debt or fear. In those precious minutes I spent sitting at the bar at Bird Dog cutting off bites of crispy and spicy fried bird by myself, the world around me fell away. There was only this little room, the next bite, and the next sip of Chardonnay.
Then, all too soon, the chicken was gone. I rubbed the last morsel of white bread on the plate to get my final taste and suddenly the outside world came back into focus. I closed out and it was time to go see Aubrey Plaza in her off-Broadway debut.
John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a tempestuous story of barroom love that is always verging on violence and brimming with sexual tension. A two person play first performed in 1983 by John Turturro and June Stein, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea brings a desperate and divorced Roberta and a scrappy and naive Danny together in a dive bar that might exist in any era, but as the accents and the manuscript make clear, takes place in the Bronx. In fact, Shanley’s dedication page reads:
This play is dedicated to everyone in the Bronx who punched me or kissed me, and to everyone whom I punched or kissed.
The 1983 version was criticized by Mel Gussow for The New York Times, who said the play was “too long (85 minutes) to be approached as a vignette, and it is too dramatically underdeveloped to be regarded as a full-length double portrait.” However, Gussow nevertheless called Turturro, “an astonishing newcomer,” whose acting “seems totally intuitive” and added “[Turturro] retains a savage, animalistic air, so much so that it is a surprise to learn that he is a trained actor and a 1983 graduate of the Yale School of Drama.”
Christopher Abbott is similarly able to capture a savage and animalistic air in the 2023–24 revival. Like the 1983–84 version, there is little need for anything on the stage but beer, pretzels, cigarettes, and — eventually — a bed. In fact, the manuscript specifically states:
Only those scenic elements necessary to the action should be on stage. Only those areas that are played in should be lit.
“How ‘bout a pretzel?” Abbott’s Danny asks Plaza’s Roberta at the open of the show. “No, they’re mine!” Plaza shoots back from the next table over in a garish Bronx accent that makes an audience otherwise familiar with her voice chuckle.
“You ain’t gonna eat all of ’em. C’mon, lemme have one.”
“Fuck off,” Plaza sneers.
This blue collar, down-and-out, hot-tempered revival sees Plaza’s Roberta filled with pain and regret. Dissatisfied with her life and turned on by violence, she tries to — and to an extent does — fix Abbott’s Danny. With only Shanley’s shockingly quick character arcs to work with, Plaza and Abbott do surprisingly well to convince the audience of their characters’ sudden life changes brought on by the desire to fan the flame of their passion for each other.
In the 2023–24 revival, Danny and the Deep Blue See presents two characters entirely devoid of philautia and driven carnally by what is right in front of them — beer, pretzels, and sex. It manages to bring the audience around in 80 minutes — under the echoes of Hall &Oates “I Can’t Go For That” — to the unlikely conclusion that good sex and quick vulnerability can cure a lifetime of suppressed anger and disappointment. Maybe they can.
Both the 1984 and 2023 New York Times reviews of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea liken the interplay between Danny and Roberta to a prize fight. To an extent this is true, the first scenes are combative and the dysfunction never ceases. However, the play is ultimately one of being made soft by the unrelenting need to love someone. By the unceasing desire to fuck and by the all-too-rare desire to lay next to the person you fucked afterward. By the unexpected and all-consuming feeling that rushes over you as you realize you don’t want them to leave. By the lengths you’ll go to, and the rationalizations you will embrace, to keep them in that bed with you.
Plaza has ventured into more serious roles over the past few years, including a 2023 Emmy nomination in the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series category for her role as Harper Spiller in The White Lotus. Still, Plaza’s Roberta in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is something much different. Despite moments of comedic relief, threats of violence, and outsized Bronx accents, there is a deep existential dread in Plaza’s portrayal of Roberta — a visceral need to give and receive love that she fears she is not worthy of. There is pain from Roberta’s childhood trauma revealed midway through the performance. There is the need to tame a brute who also struggles to produce any self-love. There is dramatic depth to Roberta laying on Danny as the lights dim in a simple set bedroom, finally having calmed him before the sun rises.
Ultimately, the 2023–24 revival of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is an aggressive and entrancing story of punch-drunk love. This type of love is both eros and mania — sexual and obsessive — not unlike the couple making out on their way to 30th Street Station on the Market Frankford Line. Though I did not avert my eyes from Aubrey Plaza.
