TheaterWorks’ Raucous ‘Raging Skillet’ A Mix Of Sweet And Salty

One of the earliest signature dishes created by the celebrated New York caterer Rossi was the “Snickers and Potato Chip Casserole.” It is designed to serve “six not-so-stoned teenagers, or two who are stoned,” and consists of candy bars, marshmallows, butter and chips.

In her empowering “memoir with recipes” “The Raging Skillet,” published in 2015 by The Feminist Press, Rossi helpfully suggests that when making this casserole you should “go for plain chips, not salt and vinegar or anything like that.”

Hartford playwright Jacques Lamarre has adapted Rossi’s 2015 memoir “The Raging Skillet” into a three-person play that resembles that casserole: It’s sweet and slippery, with some tough chewy bits. And acting against Rossi’s advice, Lamarre goes for the salt and vinegar.

“Raging Skillet” has its world premiere at TheaterWorks through Aug. 27, closing the theater’s 2016-17 season.

The play is presented as a cooking demo by Rossi (Dana Smith-Croll, a versatile actress who’s active with the off-Broadway TACT company) and her sous chef DJ Skillit (George Salazar of the off-Broadway cult musical “Be More Chill”). The event is crashed early on by Rossi’s long-dead mother, credited only as Mom and played by the veteran New York actress Marilyn Sokol.

The style shifts from a lecture/presentation (“Welcome to the launch party for my first-ever book”) to presentation-with-interruption (“Ma! What the heck are you doing here?”) to some actual dramatic scenes. Salazar sometimes drops his DJ/assistant persona to portray various chauvinist males whom Rossi confronted in her climb from bartending and dipping thousands of strawberries in chocolate to calling her own shots as a cook and caterer.

Samples of the “Snickers and Potato Chip Casserole” and several other Rossi specialties — chocolate-covered bacon, pizza bagels, skewered mozzarella balls and tomatoes, barbecued chicken — are passed out to the audience throughout the show. This can be distracting, but the smells of oils and spices wafting from a working onstage stove certainly adds to the ambience. So does the physical act of food preparation. As Rossi, Smith-Croll seems credibly work-driven and a bit tired-looking, thanks to the amount of cooking, acting and serving. She has a lot on her plate, as does the show’s director John Simpkins. “Raging Skillet” is too busy for a cooking demonstration or a play.

The performers — all of whom have experience with new works and experimental concepts — seem to be having a good time, cracking each other up occasionally. They’re patient and amiable when faced with such awkward variables as how long it can take to distribute food among the audience. While there are no real audience-participation segments written into Lamarre’s script, the actors — Salazar in particular — enjoy chatting up the crowd while dispensing appetizers.

TheaterWorks has spent much of its season dealing with themes of social and racial stereotyping, but whereas “Relativity,” “Next to Normal,” “Sunset Baby” and “Fade” openly challenged common perceptions of immigrants, urban African Americans and the clinically depressed, “Raging Skillet” unapologetically embraces one of the hoariest old stereotypes, the annoying Jewish Mother.

Lamarre’s defense, in his “Raging Skillet” program notes is that “thanks to the influence of the Yiddish Theatre and Borscht Belt comedy, it is seemingly impossible in my mind to separate Jewish language from American humor.” Yet Lamarre has chosen to write about real people here, celebrating Rossi’s individuality and nonconformity and even ending the play with revelations about Mom’s personal achievements as a young woman. All the clichéd Jewish mother stuff, while amusing enough, undercuts the distinctiveness and originality that “Raging Skillet” seems to want to celebrate.

Besides the constant food-serving, “Raging Skillet” provides a raucous soundtrack of music from Rossi’s impetuous youth. This ranges from snippets of classic rock from Queen, Alice Cooper and The Doors to seminal female punk rock anthems by X-Ray Spex, The Slits and The Runaways, with blasts of Blondie, Duran Duran and Patti Smith falling somewhere in between.

It’s the kind of mix that pleases no one person (except perhaps Rossi?), while trying to comfort the masses with stuff that’s loud, familiar and in your face. Kind of like a Catskills comedy routine full of Jewish mother jokes — or a Snickers and Potato Chip Casserole.

RAGING SKILLET by Jacques Lamarre, directed by John Simpkins, is at TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford, through Aug. 27. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $50-$65. Copies of Rossi’s book “The Raging Skillet — The True Story of Chef Rossi, A Memoir With Recipes” are available for purchase onstage after the performance for $20. 860-527-7838, theaterworkshartford.org.