If you like your absurdist comedy sunny-side up, the yolks are plenty obvious in “An Empty Plate at the Café du Grand Boeuf.” Set in an exclusive Paris café staffed with a clutch of hovering waiters, the object of their attention is a lone customer, Victor, the millionaire owner of the restaurant-for-one who appears one night on the brink of suicide.
The premise of the play currently on Riverside Theatre’s smaller Waxlax stage is certainly a classic of the genre. The existential questions of love, death, misery and pleasure are offered in just about equal proportions, sauced with enough literary references to warrant a full baguette for the mopping.
Victor, the millionaire newspaper reporter (now that’s funny) played with studied melodrama by the excellent Jim VanValen, has just returned from Madrid, where he has been a) to the bullfights; b) reading too much Hemingway; and c) dumped by his girlfriend.
An early joke has to do with the maître d’s wife Mimi (Maria Couch) welcoming Victor back from his travels. She plows through a complex phrase of Italian before her husband stops her: Victor went to Madrid, not Milan. “But I don’t know it in Spanish,” she whimpers.
“Buenas noches,” prompts Victor.
“Bonos nachos,” says Mimi.
Maybe playwright Michael Hollinger was fully aware that the French despise puns. He clearly knew they love Jerry Lewis. The opening scene is straight out of that playbook, when the apprentice waiter Antoine (Daniel Burns) does a pratfall before he even gets through the kitchen door. He arrives tableside to reveal a beat-and-a-half-long stutter, enough to stall a show that’s already one course too many.
Antoine’s impediment extends to musicianship: At one point he is directed by Gaston the chef (Andrew Sellon) to serenade Victor with “Lady of Spain” not on the violin, but on a horribly played horn.
The acting, though, is meticulous, down to a properly inverted fork clattering on the plate, the one set before Victor empty of its grand boeuf.
Ah, the symbolism, as rich as the rosemary wine sauce: The invisible Chateaubriand for two has been whittled down to one – Victor has shown up without his girlfriend. That break-up is in part to blame for his terminal malaise and intentions to “se suicider,” as they say.
“I’m starving,” Victor announces. Only he means it literally. “I want to die a gradual death” over months, he says, if that’s what it takes to tell his “last story.” L’éditeur, s’il vous plaît!
When Gaston decides to be merciful and hands Victor his gun – he has it because he too has been meaning to end it all – there’s a soupçon of surprise for us all. But it quickly passes and Victor tells the staff his existential truth: He is sterile, a fatal flaw for which his girlfriend has left him. Or so he thinks; she suddenly returns and tells him the real reason, but not before the kitchen has tempted him with a dessert he can’t resist (we’ll just call it crème cruelé).
Directed by Allen Cornell, who also designed the four-star set, the comedy gets its dramatic heft from VanValen, who two years ago visited Vero to perform in the one-man show “Underneath the Lintel” and who recently returned to become Riverside’s director of education. For his talent alone, the show is worth seeing, and you’ll enjoy some light laughs on the side.
“The Empty Plate at the Café du Grand Boeuf” runs through next weekend.
