Playwright and performer Zorana Sadiq likens the act of writing a play to raising a child. “We pour love into something,” she explains. “We worry over it. We put all of our attention on it when we think it is struggling.” That emotional clarity and careful attention to growth –whether for a child, a story, or a homemade meal – runs through Comfort Food, Sadiq’s new play, now running at Crow’s Theatre until June 8, 2025.
Commissioned by Crow’s and directed by Artistic Director of Outside the March Mitchell Cushman, Comfort Food is the world premiere of Sadiq’s sophomore work as a playwright. The play centres on Bette, a popular cooking show host whose young-mom persona has been losing its on-screen and real-life relevance. As Bette contends with the end of her long-running series, she must also confront the emotional drift of her teenage son KitKat (played by newcomer Noah Grittani), whose obsession with climate change and the digital world is pushing him further away from their once-shared ritual of cooking. Comfort Food is a warm and sharply observed look at what happens when analog parenting collides with digital childhood – and the love languages that persist when words begin to fail.
The production marks a homecoming of sorts for Sadiq. The Pakistani Canadian actor, playwright, and classically-trained soprano is a frequent collaborator with Crow’s Theatre. Earlier this season, she appeared in a leading role in the Crow’s/National Arts Centre co-production of Trident Moon (read Scott Sneddon’s review of it on sesayarts.com) – and before that, debuted her acclaimed solo show MixTape with the company, earning three Dora Award nominations in the process. In 2020, she served as playwright-in-residence at Crow’s.
Comfort Food, which Sadiq developed during a 2024 residency at the Banff Playwrights Lab, is the fruit of a special passion of Sadiq’s. “I am always writing about family, in a way,” she explains. “Bette and Kit, a mother and son, were the smallest extractable part of a family. And it felt like a manageable and exciting way to examine the nuances around familial love and how children, with their specific needs, end up teaching parents how to be a parent.”
Cooking and commotion
As a mother and an avid cook, Sadiq found fertile ground in the notion of nourishment – both literal and emotional. “I’m a cook, and I love having my loved ones around a table,” she explains. “The fact that this act of cooking to express love has been a muscle in me from early adulthood – when I would throw Thanksgiving dinner parties for my university pals – to now, when I cook for family and friends, made it an easy and familiar place to explore the possible adjacencies of this subject.”
During her early research for the play, she interviewed professional chefs Vikram Vij, Didier Leroy and Regan Daley, who generously explored their experiences as makers of food. For Sadiq, the most fascinating part of these interviews was how often “love and family came up as a seminal part of why they cooked or how they cooked – and how they understood love and food in relation to each other”.
Although the play is rich with domestic texture and culinary imagery, it also speaks directly to broader anxieties challenging families today, including climate change, the generational divide, and the overstimulation of digital life. “Yes, it’s a crazy time to be a parent! Or maybe all parents say this of their moment in time?” muses Sadiq. “The access to information, both good and troubling, means the kids are smarter and faster, earlier. But they are still young, still figuring out the balance of instant gratification and the long game, among other things.”
In this light, Comfort Food’s mix of cooking and commotion does not encode a simple lesson: “I don’t [think] that plays, or art in general should aim to have a message, per se,”, she notes. “But I hope that audiences will go home thinking more a bit about our current moment—having more empathy both for young people and their inheritance of this fragile planet, and also for the parents who are trying and failing, and hopefully trying again.”
Co-parenting the play
Sadiq likens the experience of shepherding a play into existence to an exercise in parenting. She concedes that “often, as a writer, I feel the urge to muscle something along, when I know it’s not ready, and hasn’t been arrived at organically. Sometimes you do need to be structured and pushy with a scene. But sometimes, you need to be patient, and let the scene come to you.” Of course, “children can be the same. It’s a balance, guidance and firmness at times, and also the terrifying free-fall of waiting and having faith that you’ve nourished something enough that it will grow or thrive—whether it’s a play or your teenaged-son.”
And she taps into that same nurturing spirit in her collaborators, with whom she has enjoyed “such a joyous, fruitful time”. She calls out Cushman as “a dream collaborator”, noting that “since his eye was on the piece as a dramaturg before we started the rehearsal process, his understanding of the play is very complete.” Even better, “we both had personal ‘ins’ for this piece, and the conversations we have had through this past year, both in our work at the Banff Centre exactly a year ago, and as we’ve continued forward to this present moment—have been so rich.”
Sadiq is equally unequivocal in praising her young co-star. “Noah Grittani was a gift to us…We saw such incredible actors for the role – but we knew that verisimilitude around what young people are like – how they move, what their resting energy can be like, what kinds of perspectives they would bring to working on a new text – this was all very important to us.” When she and Cushman first saw Grittani audition, he was in his last year of high school, just three years older than KitKat, the character he plays. “The role is challenging, and requires flexibility and sensitivity,” Sadiq notes. So “watching Noah [rise] to the challenge of this role in his first professional show, while also honoring his expertise on the subject of being young, has been a thrill for all of us.”
Delivering a feast for the senses
“I keep joking that Comfort Food is the big little play,” notes Sadiq. And the reason for this is its full-sensory design, which has been realized by an “extraordinary design team” whose contributions she is quick to enumerate. “Sim Suzer has made magic in the petite studio space with her set design. I cried when I saw it,” she admits. Meanwhile, Thomas Ryder Payne (who also did the sound design for Sadiq’s first play MixTape) has formed a sonic subtext that is “so exquisite” . . . while Tori Morrison brings the “perfect touch” to her video design, which brings this world of broadcasting into focus. Meanwhile, Echo Zhou is “working miracles around the energy of light in this play, and how it nourishes and illuminates these characters on stage. And then our stage manager Meghan Speakman is miraculously orchestrating it all.”
Reflecting even more deeply on this the creative and collaborative process, Sadiq offers a final fitting metaphor for both the play and the process of bringing it to the stage: “It’s a very moving thing to make your story by yourself, and then to examine it lovingly but concisely with a dramaturg, and then to hand it to a team of experts. . .. It’s like I baked this cake, and now everyone is going to help me serve it – more beautifully and deliciously than I ever could have by myself.”
Like the meals that bind families together, Comfort Food serves up a recipe for connection and reflection that is grounded in love, touched by heartbreak, and satisfying enough to linger after the house lights come up. Comfort Food runs at Crow’s Theatre until June 8, 2025. Reserve tickets on crowstheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
