‘All Recipes Are Home’: Eastern Iowa project focuses on food’s moods

When you think about food, what comes to mind?

Members of Iowa City band Awful Purdies have asked hundreds of people that question.

'One octogenarian told us about growing up next to her neighbor's grape arbor and eating this Concord grape pie,” band member Marcy Rosenbaum says. 'She described that pie in great detail, with passion.”

Recalling that dessert transported the woman decades back to her childhood. By the end of the story, everyone in the room could practically taste the grapes.

That ability of food to evoke memories and connect people across time and place is the center of a play and accompanying album, 'All Recipes Are Home,” a collaboration between the Awful Purdies and Working Group Theatre. Commissioned by Hancher in partnership with Grinnell and Luther Colleges and part of the University of Iowa's Food for Thought theme semester, the 'All Recipes Are Home” play will be presented in four performances around Eastern Iowa this month.

The album will be released at a June 27 concert and available for download from Maximum Ames Records.

Iowa City-based Working Group Theatre was founded in 2009 by Sean Lewis, Martin Andrews and Jennifer Fawcett, who together have produced over 30 original plays and events. Folk band the Awful Purdies is Katie Senn, Nicole Upchurch, Katie Roche, Sarah Driscoll and Rosenbaum.

Band members and Working Group Theatre Artistic Director Lewis separately traveled the state to research the piece. The Purdies talked with organic and conventional farmers, with farmworkers and farmers market vendors and consumers, collecting hundreds of surveys and hosting four 'conversation circles” around Iowa. Lewis spent a day serving lunch in a school cafeteria and another working on an organic farm, and interviewed farmers around Iowa and workers at meat packing plants. Slowly, a story and the songs emerged.

What struck Lewis during his research was how much emotion people wrapped up in food.

'One lady talked really extensively about this ravioli and this special olive oil she's never been able to find again.” Lewis says.

He speculates it's not that the olive oil doesn't exist, but that no other olive oil could ever taste as good, because the feelings and memories of her grandmother serving that olive oil can't be replicated.

He took that idea and built a story of a young man who tells his sister he has been hired to work on a farm in faraway Iowa. She insists he take a long-standing family recipe with him. When she realizes he has left it behind, she embarks on a journey across the state, finding foreclosed farms, meatpacking plants and more in her search for brother.

Lewis says the story has a 'fairy tale” feel, with elements of magic and with the accompanying music. It's a different turn than much of Working Group Theater's past work.

'Honestly, we've done some really heavy shows,” he says. 'We've talked about race, Alzheimers, cyber bullying. I really wanted to do something kind of joyful.”

For him, storytelling is about chasing 'the epic of the mundane” - finding the unique and dramatic and often wonderful elements of people's everyday experiences and giving those moments their due onstage.

'This fairy tale structure started coming together for me,” he says.

Roche says people shouldn't think of the show as a traditional musical, though the band performs throughout the play and cast members sometimes join in.

Rather than a play where songs break out, she says, 'It's more like an Awful Purdies concert where a play breaks out.”

The band received a grant for the project from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Iowa Arts Council, a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs. The process of writing this album was vastly different from their first two albums.

'We've all been song writers for years, but they've always come from our own experiences,” Roche says.

Interviewing strangers and writing from there was a new experience.

'One thing that surprised me is how central food is to all of us. There's no one who doesn't have an emotional connection on some level,” Rosenbaum says. 'I'm just grateful to be part of the conversation.”