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by Lynn Nottage, directed by Philip Akin

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front Street East, Toronto

April 15–26, 2026

Clyde: “I don’t do pity”

For those who have enjoyed other plays by Lynn Nottage, Clyde’s will come as a disappointment. Unlike Intimate Apparel (2003), Ruined (2008) or Sweat (2015), Clyde’s (2021) is a comedy. Yet just because Nottage is writing a comedy doesn’t mean she has to lose all the complexities of story and characters that marked her serious plays. Strangely, Nottage’s attempts to force a deeper meaning onto the action of Clyde’s feel artificial and even nonsensical. The cast is excellent. One only wishes Nottage had given them a more substantial and coherent work.

The story takes place in the kitchen of a dingy truck stop in Reading, Pennsylvania. The tyrannical Clyde, a former ex-con, is the owner, and she hires only ex-cons to work for her. We first meet Montrellous, a well-spoken philosophical man in quest of the perfect sandwich, who believes that more inventive offering could elevate Clyde’s from a mere truck stop to a destination restaurant.

Montrellous’ enthusiasm has sparked the creativity in two of Clyde’s other short order cooks. One is the ex-drug- using Latino man Rafael. The other is the young Black woman Letitia (known as Tish) whose main concern is the disabled daughter she has to care for. New to the group is Jason, a young White man with gang tattoos. Part of the plot concerns Jason’s journey from rejection by the group to acceptance.

The main plot, if there is one, involves the increasing tension between Clyde and these four employees. Her attitude toward them from the start is brutal and dismissive, rather hypocritical of her since she has done time herself. She rubs it in that they are ex-cons who won’t find a job elsewhere and are imminently replaceable. She emphasizes her power over them as a means of maintaining compliance with whatever she decides.

In contrast to Clyde’s iron fist in an iron glove are the inspiring words of Montrellous. He is on the constant search for the perfect sandwich, and he, Tish and Rafael constantly describe to each other the components of new sandwiches they have invented. Even Jason, once loosens up and becomes accepted, is caught up in Montrellous’s quest.

Not only are Clyde’s mercilessly nasty personal put-downs of each the group a deterrent to their optimism, but so is her absolute refusal to sanction any plan, however theoretical, to change anything about Clyde’s menu. In a pattern that becomes far too predictable, Clyde savagely knocks down any form of hope that her workers express for themselves or for the restaurant as a whole.

Nottage’s play is structured as a pattern of augmentation followed by deflation. The augmentations can consist of expressions of optimism or sentiment which Clyde seems to encourage before she deflates them with some incredibly cruel remark. The pattern also applies to the augmentations of Clyde’s rage-fuelled tirades that a humorous remark from one of her staff can puncture.

Such verbal battles make up nearly the entirety of the play except for the predictable sections where the four employees in turn reveal the reasons that they went to prison. It turns out that all four are essentially good people. Three know they made mistakes they now regret. Montrellous’ incarceration was a saintly act on his part to save his brother from ignominy.

Unsurprisingly, the character we know least about is Clyde. Why she went to prison or how she came to own a restaurant are unknown. One of the staff says that the restaurant lauders money for the mob. It’s clear that the source of her produce is shady. In a moment of weakness, she reveals that she is deeply in debt but says nothing more.

What is completely unclear is how Nottage wants us to view the play. There are lots of laughs, that is if you find a steady stream of insults and put-downs funny rather than tiring. But, it seems, Nottage wants her story of kitchen workers subject to a petty tyrant to have greater meaning than the sit-com pilot the show appears to be.

One method she uses is Montrellous’ philosophical discourses. Some in the play compare what he says to Zen or Buddhism, but, in fact, it is merely a practice of mindfulness. He wants eaters of a sandwich to be aware of the journey of each component from its origin to its inclusion in the work of art they are eating. Significantly, he states that “sandwiches are the most democratic of all foods”. (This is a rather odd idea since sandwiches are named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who invented the snack so that aristocrats could eat without interrupting their drinking and gambling.) Montrellous also says of one his creations “this sandwich is my freedom”.

What Nottage would like us to think is that the four employees, though beaten down by Clyde and the general circumstances of their lives, gain renewed hope for the future and increased belief in themselves through their creativity. In her Notes to the published play, Nottage writes that “There should be a gentle, subtle shift in the colors and textures of the environment, reflecting the spiritual and emotional evolution of the characters. The space becomes more serene, verdant, and vibrant over the course of the play”. I did not note any such shift in Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting, I certainly did not feel any increase in serenity.

Perhaps, that is because director Philip Akin tried to emphasize a side of the play that Nottage leaves for the very end. Early in the action when angered, one staff member says Clyde must have sold her soul to the devil. Another time, Jason exclaims that she is the devil. At the end of Scene 1, Clyde’s cigarette bursts into flame. In the final stage direction for the play, Nottage writes of Clyde, “[A] devilish smile creeps across her face, and in a flash fire surrounds her”. To underline the supernatural atmosphere, Akin has employed Magic Director and Designer Michael Kras to create these effects. Thus, not only is there fire at the end but some waiters’ tickets burst into flame and Clyde makes some very surprising entrances.

There are problems with both these attempts to give the play greater meaning. As for Montrellous’ ideas, a sandwich is too lowly and historically not even an appropriate vehicle for his metaphor of a sandwich equalling democracy or freedom. Much of the humour of his speeches derives from the distance between the ignominious sandwich and what it is meant to represent.

As for Nottage’s bid to give the play some supernatural context, the main difficulty is that is makes nonsense of all the went before. If Clyde is meant to be the Devil in disguise, why would the Devil preoccupy itself with four ex-cons in a rundown diner? Are we to think the action we’ve seen is some kind of hellish test that Devil puts humans through before they are released, and, if released, released where? If Akin has tried to prepare us for the final revelation of Clyde’s identity, he does so in too haphazard a fashion for it to be effective.

Further complicating an understanding of the play, after the four employees defy Clyde, Akin has them exit, not through the single door at the back that they have always used, but through the “walls” of the kitchen into the wings. This simple action suddenly puts a metatheatrical spin on what we have seen, meaning we should not have been caught up in the realism of the action but should have been viewing the play as a play. The trouble, of course, is that indicating how we ought to have been viewing the play only at the very end is far too late for us to appreciate what it means.

Despite the confusion in Nottage’s play and in Akin’s direction of what greater meaning the play might have, the cast give uniformly outstanding performances. Principal among these is Sophia Walker as Clyde. None of Nottage’s characters in Clyde’s is fully rounded, least of all Clyde herself, who is unchangingly cruel from first to last. Nottage varies Clyde’s attacks often by having Clyde play nice and then mocking her victim for believing she was sincere. Walker is good at convincing us that maybe finally Clyde has changed, but we, like her poor workers, get suckered again and again. Walker plays Clyde as so full of rage, we’d like to know both how she got that way and why she helps out ex-cons by hiring them. Nottage leaves Clyde a mystery that not even Walker can solve no matter how far over the top she sails.

Of Clyde’s employee, Sterling Jarvis stands out as Montrellous. Nottage may think that Montrellous’ lyrical descriptions of sandwiches and their ingredients is comic, but Jarvis speaks these lines in such an earnest, beatific manner that we admire his thoughtfulness and enjoy the calm his words represent in contrast to the fury of Clyde’s.

Augusto Bitter and Jasmine Case are excellent as Rafael and Letitia. They show us two innocent, vulnerable people who did indeed make a mistake but now are trying their best to get back on the right track. Nottage gives Johnathan Sousa’s character Jason, the only White person in the play, the greatest dramatic arc of all the characters. Sousa artfully details Jason’s path from resentment and distrust to happiness to find fellowship and surprise to find even he can be creative.

I must admit that the rest of the opening night audience was howling with laughter whereas the show never moved me even to crack a smile. With the basic set-up never explained, the motivation and even the nature of the main character a mystery and the dialogue consisting almost entirely of insults, I couldn’t see what was so amusing. I had hoped to see another great play by Lynn Notage. Instead, all I got was a live sitcom with confused intentions.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Sterling Jarvis as Montrellous, Johnathan Sousa as Jason, Sophia Walker as Clyde, Jasmine Case as Letitia and Augusto Bitter as Rafael; Augusto Bitter as Rafael and Sophia Walker as Clyde; Johnathan Sousa as Jason, Sterling Jarvis as Montrellous, Augusto Bitter as Rafael and Jasmine Case as Letitia; Sterling Jarvis as Montrellous, Johnathan Sousa as Jason, Sophia Walker as Clyde, Augusto Bitter as Rafael and Jasmine Case as Letitia. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.