Zorana Sadiq serves up some uncomfortable truths in Comfort Food

I should have known not to judge a play by its title and poster image.

Based on these, Zorana Sadiq’s Comfort Food (Rating: ✭✭✭✭) seemed to me like it was going to be a gently satiric but ultimately comforting look at the absurdities of lifestyle television. But as the 90-minute play unfolded, it became a far richer, more complex dish.

The show centres on Bette (Sadiq), a chatty, likeable TV cooking show host. At the top of the show, she’s in the midst of taping her segment, preparing waffles, regaling us with anecdotes and taking the odd call from her unseen producer to tweak her content.

Occasionally she mentions her teenaged son, KitKat, and before long we meet him. Concerned about what’s happening to the planet, the 15-year-old (played by talented newcomer Noah Grittani) has his own YouTube channel, where he’s apparently found a likeminded tribe of followers.

It also turns out he’s highly critical of Bette — and not just because he’s a surly teen criticizing what he perceives as her wastefulness or the frivolity of her show. Underlying some of his frustration, perhaps, is the fact that his birth was the result of donor insemination. He’s looking for his identity in more ways than one.

When Bette, prompted by her producer, starts taping her show live, Kit asks to be a guest — something he used to do years earlier. Bette is fine with it; he was always popular with her viewers, and perhaps it will bring her closer to him (and help boost the ratings). But after he appears, he begins stirring things up in a major way.

Sadiq’s script is more ambitious and wide-reaching than her much-produced debut play, MixTape. And while not everything comes together, it’s all pretty fascinating in its slight messiness. Generational conflict is universal, of course, but Sadiq has stirred in some specific ingredients that make this particular family dynamic feel authentic: the alienation of social media, for instance, the pressures of single parenthood, and the very real fear of growing up in a world that’s on the brink of destruction.

What I really like about the script is that there are no pat answers — or approaches to the material. Sadiq, so powerful in Anusree Roy’s Trident Moon earlier this season, tries to be a calm, reasonable mother, but you can see the effort it takes as she’s met with surly resistance. Grittani’s Kit, meanwhile, is seething with resentment and anger but unsure where to direct it. (The actor also gets to show off his range by playing several guests on Bette’s show.)

Director Mitchell Cushman ensures that shifts between the play’s various locations — studio and home, kitchen and bedroom — are handled smoothly. Sim Suzer’s handsome set includes two large kitchen islands that act as demonstration tables for Bette’s cooking. These islands can be moved around to clear out the playing area, and during transition scenes, the actors can often roll them threateningly at each other, communicating the unspoken tensions between them.

The back wall is filled with shelves, including two sliding cupboards that open to reveal Kit’s cramped, dark desk area, which suggests the secrets he’s been keeping from his mom. Tori Morrison’s video designs and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sounds are effectively integrated into the world of the show, whether showing us the food Bette is preparing, her show’s logo (which changes and has a different jingle midway through) or Kit’s confessional live streams, where he seems more himself than when he's talking to his mother.

Two lockers in Kit’s room perhaps contain answers to Kit’s true motivations, adding an air of intrigue and foreboding to the plot. What’s in those lockers is teased earlier in the play, and at times makes you wonder how Sadiq is going to successfully end the work. Is it really going to go there? you wonder.

The finale comes a little abruptly but, like a well-made dish, on TV or otherwise, is fully satisfying.

Comfort Food runs to June 8 at Crow’s Studio Theatre, 345 Carlaw. crowstheatre.com for info.

Coming up: Putting the personal onstage in shows like A Strange Loop, Benevolence, Poz and Beyond Ken Dryden; Dora Award nominees; Clue; and more