‘oh, Honey’ Serves Up Soup and Secrets

The site-specific production tackles big issues with big personalities.

There’s nothing better than warm soup on a chilly fall night.

That’s exactly what I got when I walked into Little Egg in Prospect Heights for “oh, Honey.” The popular Brooklyn brunch spot had been transformed into something between a theater and a diner; I sat in one of 27 seats marked with receipts bearing my fellow audience members’ names. We crowded around tables with paper tablecloths and crayons for doodling. It was cozy, communal. My neighbor saw me drawing flowers and added their own to make a garden. I ordered a piece of blueberry pie because someone at the counter had a slice that looked too good to resist. It felt like the kind of community place where people recognize one another, look out for each other, and listen.

Which made the show we were listening to all the more unsettling.

Aforementioned soup, pie, and flowers.

“oh, Honey” is a site-specific production that drops its audience into the lives of four mothers who meet every month at a diner. (They sit at a booth at the front of the restaurant, while the audience faces them at tables and on stools.) These women are not friends, as one of them makes clear; rather, they’re brought together by circumstance. All of their college-aged sons have been accused of sexual assault.

Based on a 2017 New York Times article about real mothers who formed this kind of support group, the play banks on proximity and intimacy to create discomfort. And in its best moments, it succeeds precisely because of where we are: close enough to hear everything, anonymous enough to be dangerous. We could be anyone. We could tell.

It’s a dramatic premise, but “oh, Honey” handles it less by focusing on the accusations themselves and more on the women and their relationships with one another. Who are these women who would fiercely protect their accused sons?

We meet Sarah (Mara Stephens), a chronically anxious and early mother—she comes in ten minutes before the show actually starts—who can’t stop posting baby pictures of her son. Bianca (Jamie Ragusa) is still raising smaller kids and has her sweet and confrontational sides. Lu (Dee Pelletier) is a stern school principal whose wife won’t join these meetings. And Vicki (Maia Karo) is the newcomer, buzzing with nervous energy and eager to please.

Their reasons for being there surface only in fragments. We get glimpses of just how bad things are: someone’s son may be banned from campus, another’s case might go to court. We learn the rules they’ve adopted: you can’t talk about it with your friends, and you should always have a lawyer ready. But the play is far more interested in the dynamics between these women than in their defenses of their sons.

This approach works when it leans into specific, human moments that reveal who these women are—how they interact with each other, and how they interact with Mari (Carmen Berkeley), the waitress who serves them.

In the opening scene, Mari brings a stack of monk fruit sweetener packets to the table because she knows Sarah likes them. While Sarah overbearing and oversharing liberal white woman trope, Lu is snippy and uninterested in making connections with anyone, let alone a waitress. She wants half lemonade, half iced tea, but dramatically scoffs when Mari mentions an “Arnold Palmer.”

There’s something spiteful, explosive, under the surface of all of these interactions. Some of the women are closer than others; some seemingly have personal vendettas. Before we meet Vicki, Bianca reveals she’s been texting her outside of the group. They’re so close that Bianca even orders for her before she arrives—“I feel like I know her, she’s a Caesar salad type of girl”—which makes Sarah shrink into the booth. We later learn it was Bianca and Sarah who used to text outside of the meetups, but Bianca has since ignored Sarah’s calls.

These are small battles that help us understand these women, to portray their nasty and emotional sides instead of just as mothers protecting their sons. It’s not asking for our sympathy, but rather allowing us to see them as people.

But when the play breaks from reality, our connection to these women breaks, too. At various intervals, the women speak in unison, delivering generalized speeches about womanhood—”When is it going to be my turn / To eat the soup when it’s hot / Perfectly hot”—while the lights shift to an otherworldly purple and someone’s soup bowl literally glows. They become a coven, witchy and inscrutable. The lighting changes again for “Real Housewives” moments, where each woman stands on the booth and delivers a tagline-style introduction.

Photo by Krystal Pagan

Rather than adding dimension to their personalities, these stylized moments distance us from these characters. If the goal is to uncover who these women really are, turning them into archetypes stops us from truly seeing them as people.

The best parts of “oh, Honey” instead ground us in the reality of the diner, where interactions between these women walk the line between catty and consequential. When Mari hears Sarah divulge why they’re all really there, it’s a moment of brilliance—the waitress many of the women dismissed, in a place they assumed was forgettable, becomes the one who could expose them. And we, as audience members sitting just a table or stool away, become complicit in that possibility. We’re not passive observers. We’re also witnesses.

That cramped closeness is where “oh, Honey” finds its power. This production succeeds in creating an experience where we’re forced to sit next to something we might not want to see, to be uncomfortably close to women we might not want to sympathize with. We’re let into a scary, chaotic glimpse of their world. But it doesn’t always quite know what to do once it has us there.

How to See ‘oh, Honey’

“oh, Honey” runs through November 7th at Little Egg.

• How I found out about it: Little Egg has been on my radar since it opened! I’d never been to the physical space, but had had their pastries a few times from friends who’d picked them up.

• Why I went: Theater a 15 minute walk from me with free soup and an intriguing premise? I’m in.

• How I got tickets: I was invited to this one! You can get tickets on Eventbrite. Each ticket comes with a free mug of tomato soup. You can also buy desserts (like the wonderful blueberry pie I had) at all performances, or order dinner at a Wednesday or Thursday performance.

What Else I’ve Seen...

Oratorio for Living Things

“Oratorio for Living Things” is a beautiful, spiritual music-theater piece that tackles human memory, time, and the evolution of the universe. If it sounds complex and full of big ideas, it is—but that’s not to its detriment. Instead, this show is something to immerse yourself in, even if you’re not picking up on every genius detail. (I certainly wasn’t and was still having a wonderful time). It’s both all-consuming and intimate. It’s the type of theater you need to experience to believe it.

“Oratorio for Living Things” runs through November 16th. If you’re under 30, you can get $30 tickets with Signature Theatre’s Sig30 membership (which is free!).

Punch

“Punch” tells the true story of a boy, Jacob, who kills another boy, James, with a singular punch. Told from the perspective of the puncher, this initially cold, quick-hitting play follows the trajectory of Jacob’s life leading up to the punch—and his attempt to find forgiveness from James’ parents after. While this show was slightly heavy-handed on its final message, I found it ultimately moving and transformative. Will Harrison, who plays Jacob, absolutely nails his arc. I won’t be shocked if he’s nominated for a Tony.

“Punch” runs through November 2nd. If you’re under 30, you can get $35 tickets on Telecharge with the code “35PUNCH.”

See you at the theater (or the brunch-restaurant-turned-theater)!