Table talk NewGate’s tasty Empty Plate BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	An Empty Plate In the Café Du Grand Boeuf By Michael Hollinger. Directed by Brien Lang. With Victor Lavenstein, Henrik Kromann, Seth Allen, Carol Caulfield, Marc Berry, and Nicole Maynard. At NewGate Theatre through November 1.

Paris is the perfect setting for An Empty Plate In the Café Du Grand Boeuf, a comedy by Michael Hollinger being staged by NewGate Theatre. Where better to send up self-pity while seeming to exalt it than amidst the folks who elevated tristesse to a philosophy and voluptuary excess to a social art? Americans, we amateurs at despair, treat those conditions like hobbies.

The time is 1961, the Camelot Era, when Jack and Jackie were supposed to show the French what romance is all about. Victor (Victor Lavenstein) is a fabulously wealthy American ex-pat who is not only the sole owner of the restaurant of the title, he is the sole customer. They refer to him as Monsieur and to his long-time traveling companion as Mademoiselle when they show up, which is not all that often. The French are even more neurotic than we are about being number one, so of course the Grand Boeuf claims to be the finest café in town, and its kitchen stocks everything Victor might desire.

Victor, however, has no appetite to the extent that he has come there, he announces, to starve himself to death in pleasant surroundings. He is hungry for something beyond food, he cryptically explains. The staff is in turmoil. Their own raison d’être is threatened. A compromise is reached, and a full seven-course banquet will be prepared in the kitchen, empty plates brought out to him, and the dishes intricately described.

His employees have their own problems, which they can’t quite manage to put aside for the evening. Maitre d’ Claude (Henrik Kromann) dismisses Victor’s sadness as the Human Condition. He should know. He has not been getting along very well with wife Mimi (Carol Caulfield), since he is attracted to protégé Antoine (Seth Allen), a stuttering young waiter-in-training. In pining love with Mimi is the chef, Gaston (Marc Berry). Claude’s demands that he speed things up keep him in constant exasperation ("It’s not like I have a faucet back there marked ‘Soup’ ").

Obviously, Victor’s suicidal state has to do with the absent Mademoiselle Louise (Nicole Maynard) and an abruptly terminated trip to Madrid, where a bullfight turned out to be some sort of trauma. (Scenic designer Alicia Wolcott places the characters in a bullring by separating them from the audience with low, rust-colored partitions.) This plot element seems inevitable as soon as Victor shares his penchant for Hemingway, reciting passages from The Sun Also Rises, which is heavy on the stiff-upper-lip-sublimation and other bull machismo.

This is an entertaining excursion that sometimes even approaches poignancy, a delicate balance that the playwright was toying with. What the actors bring to the table is going to control whether this comedy touches more than our funny bones. The NewGate ensemble each have their moments. Eventually, Kromann relaxes Claude’s exaggerated hauteur and becomes recognizably stodgy. Caulfield’s Mimi is always pretty grounded, as befits the gimlet glances Gallic wives give arrogant husbands. (I love Caulfield flicking her thumb at her husband a while after she recites the Italian phrase she has memorized, thinking Victor had been in Milan instead of Madrid.) Former busboy Antoine is taking memoir notes at Victor’s request, and Allen provides him with a gentle alertness. Berry’s harried cook is a model of meekness, embarrassed when he compliments Mimi, but we get a glimpse of backbone and sense that there’s more to his aversion to adultery, that French national sport, than fear of Claude.

Lavenstein gives Victor enough oomph under the world-weariness to hint at the bon vivant he must have been with Louise. But I wish Lavenstein didn’t get all goggle-eyed when Victor is alarmed toward the end, as though we wouldn’t otherwise notice. As for Louise, Maynard makes her eventual arrival — and her big secret — worth the wait. It’s crucial for us that there’s chemistry between them, and she supplies it in buckets, with a quiet understanding as well as the soft beauty such a dreamer would go for.

At not much more than 90 intermissionless minutes, An Empty Plate In the Café Du Grand Boeuf doesn’t overstay its welcome. It gives us tidbits in lieu of the bittersweet feast that the play can be, but some of those morsels are choice. For example, in other productions, the hapless Antoine has done his recurrent renderings of "Lady of Spain" on a tuba, a French horn, or a slide whistle. At NewGate he plays a Cute Little Instrument from Hell, a keyboard mouth organ blown through a length of surgical tubing. Delightful. Fleeing that is enough to give even a potential suicide reason for living. When Victor asks for an encore, we know there’s hope for humankind.