The Finkelsteins Are Coming to Dinner

Two years after his mother's death, Nate Kahn is still living with her.

Sylvia cooks in Nate’s kitchen, critiques his taste in men, curates his art exhibitions and runs the household from a sofa she’s no longer technically alive to occupy. Only Nate can see or hear her.

Then James arrives.

A young artist’s model and poet with little discretion and an allergy to clothing, James crashes into Nate’s carefully ordered life - and onto his canvas - with outrageous poems about cocks, Walt Whitman quotations and an openness that Nate cannot resist. When the two men fall in love, Sylvia declares war. She is convinced James is reckless, dangerous and destined to abandon him. James, meanwhile, cannot understand why Nate remains emotionally imprisoned by a mother who died two years ago.

As the struggle for Nate’s loyalty intensifies, his grip on reality begins to slip. Sylvia invites long-dead friends for Friday night dinner, Nate desperately tries to keep both the living and the dead happy, and James is forced to compete with a woman he cannot see. What begins as a comic clash between an overbearing Jewish mother and her son’s boyfriend becomes a painful struggle to let go of the dead.

On the night of Nate’s first exhibition, with Sylvia insisting the entire Finkelstein family is about to arrive for dinner, Nate must finally choose between the rituals and grief that have bound him to his mother and the future James offers him.

Grief is often portrayed as something that fades with time. The Finkelsteins Are Coming to Dinner begins with a different assumption: that the dead continue to accompany us long after they are gone.

Drawing on humour, tenderness and emotional honesty, the play explores what happens when love itself becomes an obstacle to healing. Nate's relationship with his mother is neither tragic nor sentimental but familiar, complicated and very human.