A Pandora’s Box of a Recipe Box 

The front porch is basically the symbol of Southern hospitality, the ideal locale to socialize on warm Louisiana nights. In The Recipe Box, it’s all that and more. 

For Austin Rainbow Theatre’s regional premiere of Del Shores’ latest work, scenic designer Kevin Brown has crafted an absolute dream of a front porch at Ground Floor Theatre: planters and flower boxes surrounding a swing, and not one, but two lovely tables to sit and take in the view. It’s a place made to watch lightning bugs and sip heavily spiked iced tea, but it also hosts fights and tears and revelations. Oh, and also a literal recipe box: a keeper of grounding family recipes and explosive family secrets that get revealed over the course of this found-family story. 

Playwright and director Shores is already an expert teller of Southern queer stories. He captures a mix of good-hearted, old-school country folks with liberal arts-educated LGBTQIA folks. The Recipe Box continues the theme of good ol’ Southern hospitality and good ol’ Southern “bless her heart”s, but focuses on endearing empathy and encouragement toward growth befitting this modern age. 

It begins with a rip-roaring, knock-down, drag-out fight bubbling out from a gorgeous Craftsman house onto the aforementioned porch. It’s the death knell of Rick (Emerson Collins, who originated the character) and Joah’s (Chris Skinner) marriage. We see Joah officially exit the relationship with heartbroken Rick sobbing after him. Complicating the already fraught moment? Joah’s aged mother Lou Wanda (Cynthia Sanders) sitting by the door, sipping peach whiskey while her son walks away. Through the gentlemen’s yells we learn everything we need to know: Joah cheated with Rick’s grad student. Rick is depressed and cannot move on from his mother’s death, even if it did happen 30 years ago. And Lou Wanda? Well, she’s left behind in her ex-son-in-law’s house. She hopes to stave off eviction by cooking food from a recipe box she found, full of Rick’s childhood favorites.

Credit: Keller Davis

The rest of the play, told over a few months, unfolds on that same porch. Collins’ fragile Rick and Sanders’ brashly bitter Lou Wanda start to bond over shared regrets. Rick arcs closer to fine, deftly guided by Collins, whose confidence convincingly expands through emotional ups and downs. There’s beauty to the solace he finds in Lou Wanda, and Sanders utterly encapsulates every 60-plus Southern gal with a checkered past and a heart of gold. Rick’s best friend Oona – played by Chelsea Manasseri, who brings her signature warmth and infectious laugh to the stage – often swings by with a listening ear and an eager tasting palate. A steady stream of home cooking and whiskey grace the table while hard truths and painful histories get unearthed, examined, and incorporated into a healthy future.

The Recipe Box is a purely conversational play. It’s a vehicle for characters to talk, two hours of building friendships and healthier psyches onstage. But one thing to note? There is no subtext in this script. It is straight up text, made to warm the cockles of a cold dead heart. Sure, it would be possible to eyeroll the bald-faced sincerity of these characters sharing their hopes, their fears, and their recognition of positive changes, but why? What is that adding to this world? Instead, why not pull up a seat and settle into a world that believes wounds can be healed, that traumas can be confronted, that perhaps there is a bright sunrise over those dark nights of the soul. All you need is baked goods and good company – and of course, a cozy porch to hold it all.

The Recipe Box Ground Floor Theatre Through September 19

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