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“Fully satisfying.” —Glenn Sumi
Bette, a beloved YouTube cooking sensation, built her brand as a relatable single mother with her toddler sous chef, KitKat, by her side. Now the host of a major network show, she struggles to stay palatable while teenage Kit grows increasingly withdrawn, his emergent climate activism leading him into the radical corners of the Internet. When the network pressures Bette to spice up her show and Kit asks to make a guest appearance to promote his niche online channel, the generational rift between them turns their televised reunion into a recipe for disaster.
Incisive, edgy, and deliciously funny, Zorana Sadiq’s Comfort Food picks apart the performative identities and echo chambers of our insatiable culture of spectacle and consumption. Exploring familial love, planetary inheritance, and the radicalization of chronically online youth, this potent play asks if our feeds provide the nourishment we truly hunger for.
“Fully satisfying...Sadiq has stirred in some specific ingredients that make this particular family dynamic feel authentic: the alienation of social media, for instance, the pressures of single parenthood, and the very real fear of growing up in a world that’s on the brink of destruction.”
—Glenn Sumi
"The play is full of clever thematic shading. Rattling throughout their interactions are notions about earthy authenticity and strategic, sustainable technologies."
—Istvan Reviews
“Zorana Sadiq’s ‘food for thought’ script is a delicious treat of a play. A nutritious mixture of terrific performances and surprising plot development I didn’t see coming. Hilarious one minute, while poignantly touching the heart, the next minute.”
—Our Theatre Voice
“Comfort Food isn’t here to soothe. It’s here to ask: what are we feeding each other, and why?”
—Intermission Magazine
“Through its small family drama, Comfort Food stylishly locates the existential drama of our Anthropocene and the Internet age, satirizing modern society’s fetishes for comfort and wasteful consumption by refracting one spectacle into the other.”
—NEXT Magazine
“A deep dive into our relationships with food, and with each other, and what happens when that all starts to crumble.”
—A View from the Box
“A superb achievement.”
—Leslie Barcza, barczablog
Zorana Sadiq is an award-winning Pakistani Canadian actor, playwright, and musician whose multidisciplinary talent spans different types of performance, from theatre and musicals to chamber music and modern opera. Her plays MixTape (nominated for three Dora Mavor Moore Awards) and Comfort Food have both been produced by Crow’s Theatre, with subsequent tours to the Grand, the National Arts Centre, and Here for Now. Her verbatim libretto, The Great Pause, was set to music by Suzy Wilde for Community Music Schools of Toronto, where she was a member of the voice faculty for eighteen years. She was selected for the 2024 Banff Playwrights Lab and served as Playwright-in-Residence at Crow’s Theatre in 2020. Zorana has also written for CBC Radio’s classical radio program, Tempo, and created an audio drama version of MixTape for CBC’s PlayMe podcast. Sadiq has worked with Crow’s Theatre, Coal Mine Theatre, Factory Theatre, Cahoots Theatre, Necessary Angel, Soulpepper, Canadian Rep Theatre, and Young People’s Theatre, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Vancouver Symphony, Calgary Symphony, and Boston Musica Viva.