Culinary Theater is an ongoing series of performance experiments by Ben Gassman and Brandon Woolf.
Ben Gassman (he/him) writes plays and other texts for performance. Botte di Ferro, his most recent play, was presented al fresco at pandemic-shuttered Brooklyn restaurant The Good Fork in July 2021. Previous plays include Purimacolo, Independent Study, 40s & Chestnuts, The Downtown Loop, and A Queens Style Hobo Story. Sam’s Tea Shack, an immersive performance experience he co-created with Sam Soghor and Meghan Finn has been presented by numerous venues in New York and Los Angeles over the past decade. Ben’s work has been developed with the support of Yaddo, Casa Zia Lina, the Bushwick Starr, the CUNY Graduate Center, The New Jewish Culture Fellowship, NYU’s Global Research Initiative, the Yiddish Book Center, Lower Manhattan Community Council, 3LD, Queens Council on The Arts & The Performance Project of University Settlement. MFA Playwriting, Brooklyn College. bengassman.com
Brandon Woolf (he/him) is an interdisciplinary theater artist and clinical associate professor at New York University, where he directs the Program in Dramatic Literature. Over the past decade, Brandon co-founded and co-directed three public performance ensembles — UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP), Shake im Park Berlin, and Culinary Theater — all of which work to explore theater's potential as both civic practice and postdramatic provocation. He has recently presented work at Invisible Dog Art Center, Mercury Store, 14th Street Y, Fulton Center, Target Margin Theater, Drama League, NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center, Kennedy Center, and a USPS mailbox on Prospect Park West. Brandon's 2020 site-specific work, The Console, was profiled in the New York Times and subsequently by an array of local and international outlets including Barbara Fuchs’ Theater of Lockdown (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2021) and The Kelly Clarkson Show on daytime TV. Institutional Theatrics, his book on the entanglements of contemporary performance and cultural policy in Berlin, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2021. www.brandonwoolfperformance.com