Review: Old Globe’s cooking-themed play ‘Stir’ is warm and touching, but needs more time

Three actors sit and stand around a kitchen counter in a theater.

May 13, 2024 3:50 PM PT

The last time Old Globe audiences saw actor-playwright Melinda Lopez in 2022, she was performing her solo play “Mala,” which was centered around her real-life experience caregiving for her dying parents in 2015.

This month, she’s back at the Globe with “Stir,” a world premiere play that she co-authored with actor-playwright Joel Perez. Lopez and Perez also co-star in “Stir,” playing siblings who have recently lost their mother.

In the 80-minute play directed by Marcela Lorca, elder sister Mariana (Lopez) has connected with her brother Henry (Perez) over Zoom in mid-pandemic April 2021 to teach him how to cook their mom’s secret black bean recipe. Mariana is at home in New York and Henry is temporarily camped in an Orlando retirement community, staying with their widowed dad “Papi,” to escape the high COVID-19 death toll in New York City.

As they chop onions and garlic, warm canned beans over the stove and sprinkle in fresh herbs and spices — yes, there’s a working cooktop onstage and you can smell and hear the veggies sizzling — they catch up on each other’s lives. Accountant Mariana, is a married mother of two adult daughters who maintains an in-control facade, but her home and personal life are secretly in shambles. Henry is a single gay graphic designer who has hit a dead end in his work and love life.

Gradually, they open up about their problems and relive happy childhood memories. But Henry’s secret plot to kidnap their mother’s ashes and scatter them far away without their dad’s consent causes a fiery break in their relationship. It also opens a new line of communication with their quietly grieving father.

The script is mostly in English, with maybe 10 percent of the words delivered in Spanish (the family is described as a mix of Cuban and Puerto Rican). At the performance I attended, Spanish speakers in the audience laughed heartily at many of the untranslated punch lines and slang. But even if you don’t speak Spanish, the meaning of the words is clearly implied.

Lopez gives a layered and naturalistic performance as Mariana and Perez provides the show’s comic relief as Henry. As Papi, Al Rodrigo is warm, charming and endearing. Performed in the round in the Globe’s Sheryl & Harvey White Theatre, the play has a clever scenic design by the singularly named Diggle, with two identical kitchen spaces that twist and join in interesting ways. Christopher Vergara designed costumes, Cha See designed lighting and Fabian Obispo designed sound.

As a new play, “Stir” could use some extra cooking time. The first half of the play drags, but it gradually picks up momentum in the final 15 minutes and ends touchingly. Some of the scenes — like an NSYNC sing-along — feel clichéd, and others feel unrealistic, like Henry discussing his self-pleasuring habit with his restrained older sister.

Unlike Lopez’s “Mala,” “Stir” isn’t about grief. It’s about how a family reconnects across generations, thousands of miles and disagreements by sharing a common bond of love, memories and black beans.