Make a sandwich in Bed-Stuy with 20 people at this live performance

Traditionally, the sandwich has been a pragmatic enterprise, something made for clean and tidy consumption. But if you make a sandwich enormous, that pragmatism disappears, and the sandwich becomes an event.

This is the idea behind Big Sandwich, a performance-slash-dinner party that layers theater, camp and interactive play between four courses of food.

A promotional email ended with the following provocation: “We hope you can make it to the sandwich...or is it a show?...Yes!”

The inaugural Big Sandwich took place at Rita & Maria, a café in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on a recent Sunday night. Twenty diners – seats were ticketed – sat around five tables, unsure of what would come next. On each table was a sealed purple envelope, printed with the words “spread sheet,” which would make sense later.

Attendees knew they were there for a sandwich and some sort of performance from their hosts: Peter Smith, a performance artist; Eleonore Condo, a writer and actress; and Hunter Speese, a producer and TV showrunner.

What followed was a four course meal — hors d’oeuvres, soup, sandwich, dessert — with speeches and acting and audience participation offered as a palate cleanser between each course.

The idea began fomenting last summer, when Condo was brainstorming what to cook for a going-away party for Smith, who was leaving for an acting gig in Santa Barbara.

They first met at theater camp when they were 14, and have long co-hosted elaborate dinner parties.

For Condo’s 25th birthday, in 2016, they cooked a “monochromatic meal,” where each course was a different color: black fruit salad, pink charcuterie plate and green pasta.

“I was like, what if I make some huge sandwiches? I knew Peter would love that,” Condo recalled over a spread of big sandwiches (from Anthony & Sons Panini Shoppe) at Smith’s kitchen table. The going-away sandwiches were a hit, she said.

This spring, Smith and Speese, who began dating last year, began toying with the idea of some sort of dinner-slash-performance. When they called Condo and asked her to join them, she was sitting outside of Murray’s Cheese shop. The event, it seems, was written in the sandwich stars.

“I picked up on this idea of serving people and [the question of], what does that mean? And can you make that art?” Speese said.

“It was a couple months of, 'What is it? What’s the thing? What are we cooking?'” Smith added. “And then one day I had a vision of a big, long focaccia sandwich and pickles on a kebab stick and a cone of chips.”

The trio began dreaming up an event that would be, in their words, “dinner party restaurant drag.”

They knew they wanted some level of audience participation, but not so much as to make anyone uncomfortable. They knew the phrase "dinner theater" would cause an awkward shiver up some spines. They knew that, above all, the food needed to be delicious. The rest could follow.

Before bringing out the hors d’oeuvres, Condo, Speese, and Smith offered their captive diners a dramatic history of the sandwich, starting with the famous Earl of Sandwich.

While the sandwich's creation myth has long entailed a man too busy gambling at a card table to sit for dinner, the earl’s estate now likes to claim that he needed a convenient dinner because he was too busy ... signing official documents.

This absurdism set the table for the rest of the meal. We ate white miso popcorn, bacon wrapped dates, marinated multicolored olives, and endive leaves filled with dill chèvre.

Here is where the “spread sheet” came in. “That’s the Chekhov’s gun of Big Sandwich,” Condo says with a laugh.

Before the soup course arrived, attendees were directed to open their envelopes, out of which fell a confetti of words: possible ingredients typed onto bits of paper. Each table would decide their ideal spread ingredients — what they’d like mixed into mayonnaise and smeared on the forthcoming big sandwich — and then present the recipe to the dining room.

Smith then read out each option; to cast a vote, audience members had to say the word “yummy!” We landed on a spread of Calabrian chili paste, roasted garlic, lemon zest, caramelized onions and black pepper.

Next came the soup course. This, too, was a joke whose punchline was yummy: a smoky green vegetable soup, topped with a crouton, presented while Smith stood center stage with an anchovy in their hand: “Caesar Salad soup, hold the anchovy”.

The event picked up an easy rhythm: people ate, they watched, they laughed, they ate again — each course followed by a bit of play. Before the sandwiches arrived, Condo and Smith performed a scene from “Angels in America,” mostly because they felt like it.

While the experience included elements of dinner theater, the emphasis was dinner. Later, the trio said they designed the evening so that there was no performing while people were eating.

We wanted to avoid a situation where people want to eat but they’re not supposed to, or they want to eat but people are talking.

Eleonore Condo

“We wanted to avoid a situation where people want to eat but they’re not supposed to, or they want to eat but people are talking,” Condo explains.

They aimed for something closer to a dinner party than "Sleep No More."

“There’s a level of interactivity there where you feel like you’re a part of it, but we’re not asking you to chop onions,” Speese said.

The hosts did all the chopping, sourcing and cleaning themselves. This was part of the performance, too: watching them play restaurant in a subversion of the typical “actor-slash-waiter” career.

When Smith paraded a cider-brined roast turkey through the cafe’s doors, the room erupted in applause. They spent the next 10 minutes assembling the sandwich in a pastry case shrouded in fabric.

When Condo lifted it for a reveal, they went wild again for the enormous slab of focaccia, now smeared with the precious proprietary spread and stuffed with turkey, cheese and vegetables.

The next Big Sandwich will be held at Rita & Maria on Dec. 3, and the trio hopes to expand it, while keeping it site-specific. When asked their dream location, Smith immediately replied: “Madison Square Garden. The Coliseum,” before leaning into the recorder.

“For the investors: we’re looking to have a kitchen location and restaurants in major cities by the end of 2025.” Condo continued: “Underneath the whale at the Natural History Museum. In the Temple of Dendur at the Met. We need angel investors, period.” This sandwich could be huge.

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See it for yourself

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The next Big Sandwich will be held at Rita & Maria on Dec. 3.

• Rita & Maria is at 588 Halsey St. in Brooklyn.
• Reservations are $59.99 and can be booked here.