The cast of “Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” which opens in March at Mad Horse Theatre in South Portland. Kat Moraros Photography

The script for Mad Horse Theatre’s upcoming production of “Women Laughing Alone with Salad” calls for an unusual prop: “An astronomical amount of lettuce,” said props designer Adam Corriveau. It doesn’t specify bibb, romaine or mesclun. It does, however, specify just how much is necessary: A mind-blowing 3 tons.

Buying 3 tons of lettuce for each of the 16 performances this March of “Women Laughing” is, obviously, a nonstarter. It’s neither practical nor affordable. So Corriveau has been scouring shops like Joann Fabrics and Hobby Lobby, experimenting with garbage bags, plastic sheeting and heat guns and pondering shades of green, all in the service of producing pretend food for the show in South Portland. “The magic of theater” means there needn’t actually be 3 tons, he said with a laugh. “But it will be A LOT. I can promise you that.”

Food props are particularly challenging for theaters. If they’re real, they can go bad. They need to be thrown out at the end of each performance and diligently replaced, plus the actors who interact with them (read, in some cases, eat) may have allergies, special diets and mere requests — diet soda as opposed to regular, say — that require accommodation. Food that in real life would be eaten hot will probably be cold on the stage. And the actors must eat any food called for not just once, not twice, but night after night for the run of the production.

A scene from Portland Stage’s production of “The Cake,” with actor Sam Rosentrater. No Umbrella Media

If the food is fake, it must be durable. To look real, a prop may need to flop like a real slice of ham, as in “Clyde’s,” a Portland Stage show last year set at a truck stop. Fake icing must credibly frost a (Styrofoam) cake on stage, as in the same company’s production of “The Cake” in 2023; the icing was made from joint compound with glue. (Do not lick the spoon!) A prop might need to melt like real butter, crack like real eggs or appear to be cooking like steaks on a grill, said Portland Stage Artistic Director Anita Stewart listing other examples of culinary stagecraft that the company has wrestled with.

Part of the challenge is that humans, perhaps a function of self-protective biology, seem hard-wired to innately understand what real food looks like. “If you go to a restaurant and you sit down and someone brings you a plate of food that doesn’t look OK, you are going to immediately recognize that there is something wrong with that food,” Corriveau said.

“With food, it has to have the right shape, the right sheen, the right volume to it,” he continued. “There’s a different threshold for being able to suspend your disbelief. Food can be incredibly tricky to try to produce.”

STAGE SET

Local theaters are getting a lot of practice. Recent years have seen a spate of shows set in bakeries, diners, truck stops and home kitchens, as well as the occasional play, like “Women Laughing…,” that explores some aspect of food; in that case, its relationship with gender and media.

Maiesha McQueen, Jimmy Ray Bennett, Desi Oakley and Gizel Jimenez in “Waitress” at Ogunquit Playhouse in the summer of 2024. Photo by Nile Scott Studios

Portland Stage may, ahem, take the cake here, with “Clyde’s,” “The Cake,” “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” (2023, also set in a bakery) and its upcoming premiere of “Madeleines,” named for the classic French cookie. Then, there is “Waitress,” a musical produced at the Ogunquit Playhouse last summer about a pie-baking waitress in a diner in an abusive marriage.

Theater people say food- and kitchen-related productions appeal because they encompass memory, accessibility (everybody eats), universality (ditto), comfort in unsettling times, connection, disconnection and hunger, both metaphorical and literal. These shows use food and kitchens as a means to variously examine tolerance, relationships, family history, hopes, dreams and second chances.

“The kitchen is a central location for the family to gather, to meet,” Stewart said. “It’s where we tell stories. It’s where you’re going to see us at our most human.”

Playwright Bess Welden, whose three-woman show “Madeleines” will open for previews on March 5, said plays set in and around food also appeal to her for practical reasons. The action in “Madeleines” takes place in two kitchens, one belonging to Rose, the tough mother character who is a Holocaust survivor and professional baker, and the other to Rose’s daughter Jennifer, whose life in New York is not as perfect as it seems.

The stage action includes baking cookies (the namesake madeleines, as well as pecan drops), sorting through a box of family recipes and eating bialys from Zabar’s. “I find it really fascinating to watch actors on stage engaged in very specific activity,” Welden said. As both an actor and an acting teacher herself, she said it’s grounding to have a relevant object to engage with and a revealing activity to do while on stage.

From the audience perspective, “We love to watch something that is is detailed and specific because it helps us understand who that character is and what the bigger story is and what the stakes are for that character,” said Welden, whose has written a previous food-related play, “Big Mouth Thunder Thighs,” a memoir about food and body. “It’s showing me this character rather than just telling me.”

Director Annette Jolles, left, and playwright Bess Welden make script revisions to “Madeleines” after a first read-through at Portland Stage on Tuesday. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

STAGE BUSINESS/LOBBY BUSINESS

Two eggs are called for in the recipe for madeleines in that show, specific objects that come with stage directions for a specific associated activity: cracking the eggs. The show itself runs for 18 performances, and the actors will presumably need to practice cracking during a few rehearsals, too. Round up and assume four dozen eggs will take care of the whole run. Also assume that the egg shortage situation hasn’t worsened by next month, so that the theater can buy the eggs for $5 a dozen (or, frankly, buy them at all). That’s $20 for the run of the show.

Granted, it’s a small amount, but Portland Stage, like theaters everywhere, operates on a shoestring budget. There are other considerations, too: In the show, the eggs are added to cookie batter, which will sit around on stage. After a performance, it can’t be sold and it can’t even be donated.

“To a certain degree, it’s cost,” Stewart said. “But it’s also, do we really want to be using materials that are now going to waste? Can we find some sort of product that looks like an egg breaking that is not an egg breaking because we don’t want to be part of what is now a problem? We could purchase some eggs, but is that really as a theater what we want to do?”

As of mid-February, the solution was a write-around. Maybe the characters will remove the eggs from the refrigerator instead of cracking them, Welden considered. “When I originally wrote the play and really, frankly, all the way up until very recently, it hadn’t even occurred to me that we wouldn’t use eggs in the show,” she said. “You have to be willing to be responsive to the moment.”

JL Rey and Ashley Alvarez in Portland Stage’s Production of “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Senoritas.” No Umbrella Media

Meanwhile, the theater is searching for a local baker to make madeleines that it can sell in the lobby during the show’s run. (For the production’s first read-through, Assistant Director Kim McCrann treated cast and crew to a container of the cookies that she’d baked herself, going so far as to buy the special cake pans necessary to make them.) During its run of “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas,” playgoers could purchase Two Fat Cats’ pastelitos, Cuban guava and cream cheese filled pastries. Such arrangements, Stewart said, create community connections, which are important to Portland Stage.

Similarly, Bread & Roses Bakery baked the apple and blueberry hand pies sold in the Ogunquit Playhouse lobby during the run of “Waitress.” “They were an enormous hit,” said Carol Chiavetta, the theater’s director of marketing. “We couldn’t keep up with the demand.”

That might have had something to do with a clever marketing ploy, the idea borrowed from the original Broadway production: At every performance, the theater placed a frozen supermarket Marie Callender pie, dusted with cinnamon and nutmeg, in a hidden oven in the lobby to slowly bake. “Almost everybody commented on how they were smelling the pie,” Chiavetta said. “It created an excitement for the show before people walked in the door.”

Bread & Roses also provided the pie that appeared on the poster for the show. Did bakery owner owner Melanie Tromblee have a chance to see “Waitress”? She did. “It was terrific!” she said. Did the lead actor convincingly make pies on stage? “Absolutely! Tromblee said.

ACT III

In order to persuasively play bakers and sandwich-makers and such on stage, actors may study videos on social media and go into real restaurants for real-live research. To get the cast of “Clyde’s” up to speed on how to handle sharp knives and construct sandwiches at a fast-paced shop, for instance, they spent time observing the action at the now-closed Ohno Cafe in Portland’s West End. “Chris Beth (co-owner) was a huge mentor,” Stewart wrote in an email. “His wife (Lori Eschholz) was a huge help as well.”

Latrisha Talley in Portland Stage’s Production of “Clyde’s.” Photo by James A. Hadley/Courtesy of Portland Stage

The actors often need to manipulate a combination of real and fake food, which can be tricky. Fake cakes in “The Cake” had a wedge cut out for a single real slice — the cake baked ahead of time and frozen in slices to last the run of the show — that the actors ate on stage. In Clyde’s, the actors squirted real condiments onto fake bread while making sandwiches. Stagehands washed the bread clean after each performance so it’d be ready for the next performance. Ogunquit Playhouse’s 2024 production of “A Little Night Music” sidestepped potential complications by having the actors mime eating a banquet, “which was infinitely just as effective and probably more creative,” Chiavetta said.

Even when the goal for the set, set dressing and props is realism, “with most prop makers, you need to allow yourself some grace when you make things,” Corriveau said. “If I had the time, I would be messing with things forever and there’s a certain point when I have to say (to myself) ‘You know, this is going to be viewed at maybe 10 feet away at the closest, and it needs to be at the theater today.’ There is an amount of suspension of disbelief, and things don’t need to be 100% photo-realistic. There is some grace from the audience.”

Once the show’s run is over, what happens to the carefully constructed faux cakes, hot glue tomatoes, foam steaks and salt-dough pies? “Don’t be surprised if it ends up on Facebook Marketplace,” Corriveau said. “Do you know anyone who needs 3 tons of fake lettuce?”

Grainne Sheehan, props apprentice at Portland Stage, paints cardboard madeleines in preparation for the upcoming show “Madeleines.” Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

VANILLA BEAN MADELEINES

Recipe from “Standard Baking Co. Pastries” by Alison Pray and Tara Smith. In the show “Madeleines,” the baker uses matzoh meal instead of flour to make the cookies suitable for Passover. You will need a madeleine pan to make these cookies.

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 vanilla bean
1/2 cup sifted confectioners’ sugar
2 teaspoons packed dark brown sugar
2 ½ teaspoons honey
2 eggs, room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch salt

Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Spray a 12-piece madeleine mold with nonstick baking spray and set it on a baking sheet.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Slice the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape the seeds into the hot butter. (Save the pods to use to elsewhere, say grind it into your morning coffee beans.) Transfer the butter into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Add the confectioners’ sugar and beat on low speed until smooth.

Add the brown sugar and the honey, then add the eggs one at a time, mixing on low speed. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Add the vanilla extract and beat until combined.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt in a small bowl. Add the flour mixture to the mixer and beat just until combined, being careful not to overmix.

Portion the batter into the prepared madeleine pan. Fill the molds 2/3 full, about a heaping tablespoon each. Bake for 12 minutes, rotating the pan after 6 minutes to ensure even baking. When they are done, the cookies should feel just firm in the center and be lightly browned on the edges.

Remove from the oven and transfer to a wire rack, letting the madeleines cool for 10 minutes before removing from the pan. Madeleines can be eaten warm or at room temperature.

Actors and stakeholders sit for a first read-through of “Madeleines” at Portland Stage in February. From left: actors Danielle Levin, Carine Montbertrand, Carmen Roman, assistant director Kim McCrann, director Annette Jolles and playwright Bess Welden. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

IF YOU GO

“Madeleines,” by Bess Welden. Portland Stage, Portland. March 5-23, $20-$73, portlandstage.org

“Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” by Sheila Callaghan. Mad Horse Theatre Company, South Portland. March 6-30, pay-what-you-decide, madhorse.com