Abe Koogler didn’t grow up going to many restaurants. He was raised on Vashon Island, Wash. — sparse and bucolic with an artsy populace, a few miles southwest of Seattle — in a house without a TV, where meals were mostly eaten at home, his free time spent fashioning handmade puppets onto chopsticks.
So when he moved to New York, a city with restaurants on virtually every corner, he found the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s highbrow establishments fascinating.
“Living in New York, you walk by all these highly curated, beautiful, warm spaces where people are in the middle of this intense culinary experience,” Koogler said on a rainy afternoon in Midtown Manhattan. “And I like looking at these windows and imagining what it’s like for the people inside.”
“A lot of it is being fascinated and not knowing why,” he added.
Koogler, 39, is known for his darkly comedic plays about labor-intensive jobs in, for example, package inventory centers and slaughterhouses. Works about work. His latest, “Staff Meal,” about a beloved restaurant with a mysterious owner, has a similar setting (much of the story takes place in the prepping of food and serving of drinks) but with a notable diversion from his previous productions: Here is a job where the employees enjoy their work. In fact, they revere it.
The restaurant’s culture of veneration for food, wine and care-taking nods to Danny Meyer’s hospitality manifesto, “Setting the Table,” and though the play, which opens on April 28 at Playwrights Horizons, begins as a familiar meet-cute, it “progressively gets weirder and weirder,” said the show’s director, Morgan Green.
After first reading the script, she wondered, “How the hell do you stage it?”
“I was really excited about this down-the-rabbit-hole feeling,” she said, and about mapping out “that trajectory.”
In “Staff Meal,” Koogler creates a world somewhere between front and back of house, where food is a portal and service an art. Meanwhile, patrons navigate apocalyptic events outside the restaurant, where the future appears increasingly fragile.
“It really feels like we’re on the same page in building this world,” Green said. “His trust makes me feel like I can be creative in response to what he’s written.”
Koogler started writing “Staff Meal” in January 2020 in New York and finished the play three months later in a cabin in the woods. He had taken refuge from the city’s chaos with his now-fiancé Luca Shapiro in the Berkshires. Deep into the pandemic’s early lonely days and isolated from the world, he desperately missed the city’s amenities, especially its restaurants.
But he was accustomed to living in and creating from remote wilderness. His childhood home in the middle of Puget Sound was a breeding ground for imagination.
Growing up, Koogler, the middle child of three boys, didn’t have a lot of friends and wasn’t skilled at sports, he said. He spent his time wandering in the woods and crafting marionettes and Muppet-inspired felt puppets. He starred as Gandalf in a “possibly bootleg” production of “The Hobbit.” His second grade teacher let him adapt “Little Red Riding Hood.”
“It took a lot of classroom time,” he said with a quiet laugh. “I was pretty specific about what I wanted them to do.”
Living on an island meant he eventually took the ferry to Seattle for school. During his commute, he’d peer over the sides to observe the octopuses gliding through the crest. Some days the boat would stop for orcas to pass (a ritual that inspired his last work, “Deep Blue Sound”).
Ample time for fantasy — and boredom — were a recipe for artistry.
Though he grew up writing and performing in plays, he didn’t set out to create a career in the theater — at least, not the kind with a proscenium.
“Electoral politics in the United States is very much a performance,” said Koogler, who studied political science at Yale. “Working on a political campaign is like putting up a play.”
He dabbled in performance while an undergraduate, but one of his first jobs after college was as an assistant campaign manager of a state assembly race in California.
It wasn’t long, though, before he returned to theater.
“When I contemplated a career in the political world, I felt like there was something missing,” Koogler said. “It’s very rational; it’s straightforward. And I’ve always been interested in the subconscious, in dream life and sort of the wilder and more mysterious forces at work in the world.”
In pursuit of dream life, he moved to New York in 2007 to study acting at the William Esper Studio, but he soon realized he was too shy to be an actor and began to take playwriting classes. “I felt constrained and limited in my ability to be creative when it was my physical body up onstage,” he said. “What I found when I was writing was that I just had this incredible freedom.”
Chasing that freedom led to an M.F.A. in playwriting at the University of Texas, Austin, where he made experimental theater and wrote “Kill Floor,” about an ex-convict who works in a cattle slaughterhouse, and then to a playwriting fellowship at Juilliard, during which “Kill Floor” was staged in 2015 at Lincoln Center Theater.
Writing for The New York Times, the theater critic Charles Isherwood called the show “a well-acted, low-key drama,” that “never strikes a false or strained note.”
Two years later came “Fulfillment Center,” a Manhattan Theater Club production centered on lonely connection-seekers who work at a mail-order shipping facility in New Mexico. The critic Ben Brantley called the show, which later won Koogler an Obie Award for playwriting, “quietly shattering.”
“His work is subtle and nuanced and it creeps up on you,” Eboni Booth, an actor and a playwright who starred in “Fulfillment Center,” said, adding that Koogler transmits to words a “constant wrangling with the self.”
“And in there is so much freedom to be a messy person,” she said.
In each play, time is stretched out over mundane work, with the perils of capitalism on full display.
“I’ve always been interested in power, in who has it and who doesn’t have it,” Koogler said.
That undercurrent has become his signature throughline. But in “Staff Meal,” the tone shifts. The hard edges of work soften into pleasure.
“After so many years of writing about difficult, harmful workplaces,” he said, “I wanted to write about a beautiful place that people love showing up to every day.”
