Dinner as Theater; Audiences rush to digest a spate of plays starring food.

Byline: Sarah Sennott, With Anna Arutiunova in Moscow and Kathryn Williams in New York

Inside a large storage shack in Ghent, Belgium, ticketholders arriving to see "Rantsoen" are handed glasses of ginger beer as they pass through a chaotic kitchen. Live chickens are running around, and the smells of coconut milk, spices and plantain fill the air. The 32 audience members take their seats around a circular table to watch the drama about seven newly arrived immigrants--which includes a meal the audience eat with their hands. "Eating has everything theater has: the rules, the relationships of people, the moments of revelation, the relaxation," says British director Renny O'Shea, who created the play. "Something magical happens when we sit around the table and eat."

On stages across the world, food is increasingly being cast in a lead role. In the St. Petersburg play "Lexicon," an actor cleans, cuts, stuffs, cooks and serves fish to sellout crowds--all while reciting Serb writer Milorad Pavich's philosophical stories. In London's "Patatboem," audience members sit at tables set for eight while eight Belgian chefs and musicians perform a "culinary concert," making music from chopping vegetables, clanging pans and whisk-drumsticks. The round stage looks like a cross between a mad scientist's laboratory and an ultramodern kitchen: beakers filled with fluorescent green liquid rest on silver carts and a large chandelier packed with green peas hangs overhead. In New York, no fewer than seven productions currently incorporate cooking into performances.

Call it the new dinner theater: a splendid recipe of drama, entertainment, exotic food and--in some cases--the chance to chow down. In a society where chefs like Jamie Oliver and Wolfgang Puck are treated like movie stars and televised cooking shows have won a huge following, creating stage drama out of cooking seems only natural. In fact, the trend is not entirely new: "kitchen-sink dramas" where meals and domestic chores are used to depict working-class life have graced the stage since the 1950s. But now food--representing comfort, fellowship, nourishment, acceptance--is increasingly being used to help audiences digest some difficult issues onstage.

Complicated family relationships are one thing being effectively ...