The marvelous Meanwhile Park outdoor theatrical venue in a neighborhood close to Liberty Park will be the perfect spot for Matthew Ivan Bennett’s newest play, the rom-com A French Toast, which opens next week. The four characters in the play are staying at À Côté du Palais, a small bed and breakfast in the south of France.
Bennett’s script is full of sunny humor but, of course, he also inflects it properly with his trademark set of insatiable intellectual curiosities. Take Yasmin, for example. A Black British lesbian, she meets Cassie, a White American who also is lesbian and is traveling with her mother, Lucy, a heartbroken Mormon who just witnessed the marriage of her ex-husband to his gay partner. Cassie is intrigued by Yasmin’s intellect. While she dabbles in Old French, Yasmin, whose forte actually is Old English, wrote her dissertation on the “epistemic violence in Beowulf.” Amid their flirtatious banter, Yasmin corrects Cassie on a few points, which seems to attract Cassie’s attention even more.
The point is that once again, Meanwhile Park, for its fifth juried Playwright Prize which was selected from more than 275 submissions from across the country, has landed on the sort of summer theater that can entice even the most performative, high-browed intellectual to revel in a genre that often borders on flighty saccharine and occasionally incredulous premises in, for instance, Hallmark and Lifetime channel made-for-television movies. In all seriousness. Yasmin surprises Cassie when she talks about her appreciation for, in Cassie words, Hallmark’s “cheesy rom-coms at Christmas.”
Ripening beautifully in his writing game, Bennett, who also won the inaugural Meanwhile Park Playwright Prize in 2023 for From June to August, cleverly inserts the reference to Victoria Nelson’s award-winning book The Secret Life of Puppets (2001). Nelson appreciated pop culture’s transcendental value and she said in a podcast interview hosted by the Harvard Divinity School, “that’s when I got this whole notion of the sub zeitgeist, the slightly less respectable underbelly of mainstream intellectual culture.” The character of Yasmin in A French Toast mirrors Nelson’s sentiments. Again, Nelson from that same interview: “Had I actually gone back to school to get a Ph.D., I don’t think I could have gotten away with anything, like what I wrote in The Secret Life of Puppets. And so I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful that I didn’t try to do it the regular way.”
This dimension of Yasmin’s character entrances Cassie perhaps the most, who is a bit exasperated by her mother’s emotionally melodramatic displays. Lucy’s heartbreak is aggravated when she discovers that she unwittingly consumed alcohol, which shocks her with fear that she has broken the rules of her Mormon faith and is no longer worthy. All in all, while Lucy’s pain of discovering her now-former husband’s real sexual identity continues to sting, she is admirably supportive of Cassie, her daughter. Lucy eventually finds comfort in Gabriel, the French inn owner, whose marriage also ended in a shocking discovery. Their mutual empathy provides a gentle opening for the two older characters.
In an interview with The Utah Review after returning from France which was in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave, Bennett said he discovered a place just like the inn he imagined for his new play. “It had a garden out back, with a duck pond and some chickens. It could’ve easily been in the play,” he added.
Bennett has written in many forms and genres, including one-actor plays, radio hour dramas, screenplays of varying lengths, chamber ensemble pieces, poetry, comedies, science fiction, etc. A French Toast came quickly and naturally to him. “I wanted to write a play that had an element of escapism, a character who was like a fish out of water and because I feel like the space itself [Meanwhile Park] is a little oasis in the city.”
Bennett also references a lovely waltz chanson, Je te veux (I want you) by the French composer Erik Satie. Best known in its solo piano form, the music is sentimental and nostalgic, but the original vocal lyrics also are sensual and exotic, which the composer translated effectively in the tonal textures of the instrumental version. Normally, Satie’s music is dark and austere, but this particular piece is so light and sunny, which slides into the right space in Bennett’s script.
Paris explained that one of the reasons A French Toast appealed to him was how it tackles as a theme the value of lowbrow and highbrow when it comes to art and how a character one might expect to stand up for a particular form actually surprises us. Regarding Yasmin, Paris said, “The highbrow characters are much more willing to say there’s this opportunity for these things to come together and mix and create something even more interesting.”
The play, directed by Jason Bowcutt who also helmed the first Meanwhile Park play by Bennett, will open July 9 at Meanwhile Park, which is near the Herman Franks Dog Park. The doors open at 8:30 p.m. on performance nights, and the shows start as the light fades. The run continues on two consecutive weekends through July 19. The cast will feature April Fossen, Matt Sincell, Ali Lente and Darby Mest, all of whom have established extensive portfolios as local actors. Noelani Brown is associate director and Emily Kitterer is stage manager.
Incidentally, this year’s pool of submissions impressed the jury so much that the 2027 prize was already awarded to Two Four Six Eight, Who Do We Resuscitate by Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend, who is based in Chicago. Dellagiarino Feriend describes the play: “A dead body is brought back to life, ostensibly to improve American vaccination rates, but really to impress the Ivy League.”
Furthermore, another finalist for the prize will now be staged at the upcoming Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival: Polaroids from the Apocalypse by Sara Alanis Morales, which will be presented by PYGmalion Productions. Set in 2095, the play’s premise is described as: “Mom keeps taking Polaroids. Dad is slooowwwwly finishing the long novel Les Miserables. Seventeen-year-old Olive is angry and angsty and always has been. Brother Leo is charming in a creepy kind of way. There is an impending cataclysm that might bring the family closer together — or tear them apart. One Polaroid at a time.”
Paris, in an interview with The Utah Review, said a musical also was submitted and while it did not fit in logistically with the characteristics of the Meanwhile Park venue, he has shepherded the play, in hopes that one of the entities in the local theater community will workshop and possibly produce it. “I’m trying to find it a home in Salt Lake City because I really think it would be a phenomenal show for Salt Lake City,” Paris added.
The 2026 production is notable, as it also marks the fifth anniversary of the founding of Meanwhile Park by Jeff Paris. He designed the space in his backyard so audience members can gather before the production for a pre-performance celebration which includes complimentary drinks and snacks. The Utah Review named Meanwhile Park as one of the Top 10 Moments of the Utah Enlightenment in 2023. As The Utah Review noted, “In the outdoor setting of Paris’ perfectly built theater, the production rides the sounds and the visions of a late July evening that amplify the script’s summery mood better than what might be experienced in an indoor theater. The play starts after the sun has set, and by the middle of the action, audience members can glimpse the bright moon rising behind the trees, feel the gentle breezes as temperatures retreat from the daytime nineties and listen to the gentle noises of summer insects or to an occasional roar of a motorcycle on a nearby thoroughfare. The emotional counterpoint of fun and games, along with the moments when a budding romance seems jeopardized and then the gently crafted epiphany appears, feel wholly appropriate in this backyard theater.”
The concept has succeeded with astonishing results. This year, tickets went on sale Feb. 1. By Feb. 24, the show was 50% sold. As of April 20, the show was exactly 90% sold out. In the first year, there were 57 submissions for the playwright prize, one-fifth of the total pool this year.
A few days after A French Toast will close, the front yard at Meanwhile Park will become the site of The Minimo Contemporary, a miniature gallery and community art space. The opener will be Prayers for Rain, a media installation by Los Angeles-based artist Sean Noyce, who was born and raised in Salt Lake City. The work, which measures 36 x 24 x 18 inches, examines Utah’s precarious relationship to water through the lens of ritual, drawing on folk magic traditions from the region’s colonial past. The installation is made of cast resin, gold leaf, brass nails, wood, plastic, generative video, and mirrors. Resin-cast golden serpents hang nailed to a white Gothic fence post, forming a central sculptural axis within the gallery. Behind it, a looped computer-generated video, composed from imagery of the Great Salt Lake at high water, unfolds as a shifting, reflective environment. A geometric floor pattern radiates outward from the central forms, extending into mirrored walls that multiply the installation.
For the opening (the weekend of July 25-26), Noyce will present a performance with sonic collaborator Johnny Gimenez at Meanwhile Park, in the backyard performance space behind the gallery. Expanding the installation into a live environment, the performance integrates video projection, sound and sculpture, while encouraging audience participation. Gimenez, the former frontman of the New York post-punk band Tyburn Saints, introduces a sonic framework of layered guitar, degraded tape loops, and rhythmic structures that echo rainfall and incantation. Tickets will be free for this opening performance
With this new visual installation, Paris said, in an interview with The Utah Review, he wants to establish the same level of credibility he has established in the realm of theater.
For tickets and more information, see the Meanwhile Park website.