A double bill at the Gateway Theatre Pacific Festival will give audiences a taste of contemporary Hong Kong life—often quite literally.

Paired with rising TV star Eric Tang’s Dry—MeChat, about cyber-relationships, MayMay Chan’s Cook Your Life is what she calls 4-D theatre—a show in which the lively comedic actor makes food right on-stage while she talks.

“I am particularly fond of cooking and I wanted the audience to have the same feeling—to experience the actual smell of the food and actually taste it,” says Chan, speaking to the Straight through a conference call, using a translator for her machine-gun pace in Cantonese.

The multitasking seems to come easily to the effervescent Hong Kong personality. “I cook through the whole show. I actually feel very comfortable and very at ease when I’m cooking live, and all the food and everything is interacting together. I teach cooking in Hong Kong as well.”

Throughout the production, the star draws comparisons between food and love. At the same time, she’ll show audiences here the way eating and cooking drive Hong Kong life.

Tang, who’s also joined the conference call, touches on love as well—but it’s directly influenced by the technology he sees young Hong Kong guys using day and night. MeChat covers everything from cybersex to the selfie craze and online dating—not always in a celebratory way.

He says the idea for his solo show came from a time when he was sitting in a friend’s car and heard a woman’s voice. He looked around and then: “I realized it was actually the voice of the GPS. It made me realize how much this technology is seeping into everybody’s lifestyle,” he says. “So the show I have is linked up to guys and new technology, and I look at why guys are really into new technology.”

Tang says he’s particularly focused on smartphones that can actually talk to us, sometimes in that strangely attractive Siri voice. “It will respond interactively, and I’m really interested and anxious about why. Is it possible that you can fall in love with this app?”

Together, Tang and Chan are presenting in Vancouver just a bit of a thriving new theatre scene in Hong Kong—a scene that Gateway’s second annual festival, which runs from Thursday (September 3) to September 26, is putting into the spotlight. Like its other shows, the Cook Your Life/Dry—MeChat double bill, produced by Bravo Theatre with Take It Easy Theatre, will be performed in Cantonese with English and Mandarin subtitles to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Chan and Tang say the fascinating thing about Hong Kong’s theatre boom is the variety of plays that are being made, especially on contemporary subjects like their own.

“Because of the increase in different themes, more people are going to see theatre,” Tang explains.

“A lot of actors and actresses doing regular movies and TV were kind of bored and wanted to do something live in theatre, on their own,” Chan says, adding that’s also bringing new audiences into theatre in her home city.

With a double bill, the team is serving up an even more diverse offering: two completely different shows in a single evening, each with its own high-design look and feel.

“I wanted a really warm kitchen in my show, so my set is all wood,” Chan says. “Eric’s is cold technology,” she adds of Tang’s icily gridlike look. “But both are definitely comedy. It’s just that mine is warm and female, and his cold and masculine.”

Cook Your Life/Dry—MeChat is at the Gateway Theatre Main Stage from September 17 to 19 as part of the Gateway Theatre Pacific Festival.