Milk ’n’ Honey

In Milk ’n’ Honey, the group LightBox heaves years of interviews and a host of issues onto the table—the smorgasbord includes diabetes, immigrant labor, genetically modified organisms, carnivore ethics and flavor science—and dices them into an intriguing pastiche of scenes, songs and mini documentaries. Imagine “The Al Gore Variety Hour” with shimmying six-foot corncobs as the Smothers Brothers. This leads to a container-sizing issue: It’s as goofy to sum up a performance in 269 words as it is to take on the American relationship with food in 100 minutes.

So when a freegan (Adam Rihacek) complains that supermarket food tastes “blurry” because he can sense the many hands that prepare it, you feel him—five writers are four too many cooks. Still, Ellen Beckerman and team have, by attempting the impossible, accomplished the damn nifty. The wide-open design finally makes sense of the impossible, garage-like 3LD space, segmenting it with shelves of packaged food and Nicole Betancourt and C. Andrew Bauer’s gorgeous stripes of projection. And the show’s moments of genius (a faux-naive presentation on corn will winnow your chaff) energize the weaker bits. But while a staggering amount of thought has gone into Milk ’n’ Honey, compressing the thinking pasteurizes and homogenizes it. If only they had junked the intermissionless model and let the bounty spill into either epic or serial forms, the ideas would, perhaps, stick to your ribs.