Actors Sebastián Arroyo, Katherine George, Quinn M. Johnson and Sekou Laidlow portray formerly incarcerated individuals who are trying to piece their lives back together at the only place that would hire them. Clyde’s is a dead end truck stop diner in Reading, Pennsylvania owned by its tough-as-nails namesake, Clyde, played by Brianna Buckley.

The former inmates painstakingly work to create a sandwich masterpiece, which required the DCPA Theatre Company’s production team to design and build a top notch kitchen on stage in the Kilstrom Theatre.

Now the Kilstrom, as loyal patrons know, is a theatre-in-the-round where pretty much everything is exposed to the audience. That’s to say that there’s not a lot of opportunity to fake it ’til you make it or, in this case, fake it until you nick your finger and call for a band-aid from the stagehand.

So this team of actors-turned-chefs took a little visit to see Chef Jake and his team at Jovanina’s Broken Italian restaurant over on Blake Street. The cast got a firsthand look inside a working kitchen before picking up the tools of the trade to get their five-star knife-skills lesson.