A Full-Course Theatrical Meal That’s Doesn’t Go Down Easy

Joel Beers
6 minutes ago
5 min read

REVIEW: South Coast Repertory’s ‘Eat Me’ serves up obsession, identity and consumption in a feast that lingers uneasily.

From left, Jake Borelli, Jeorge Bennett Watson, Sheldon D. Brown and Anne Gee Byrd in South Coast Repertory's 2026 world premiere production of "Eat Me" by Talene Monahon. Photo courtesy of SCR/Robert Huskey

A Reddit thread devoted to the epicurean lifestyle pulses through “Eat Me,” Talene Monahon’s new play, one of two full-length productions in South Coast Repertory’s seven-play new works festival, the Pacific Playwrights Project. The online forum is fundamental to the play because food – and its consumption – is central to the piece; it also feels fitting, since after watching it, many viewers may be tempted to hop online in hopes of figuring out what they’ve just seen.

Talene Monahon, "Eat Me" playwright. Photo courtesy of SCR

“Eat Me” is a dense and elliptical play, one in which more questions are left unsettled than answers are given. That’s not necessarily a flaw; for those drawn to work that lingers long after the curtain falls, it’s part of the appeal. For others, it may feel like an elaborate seven-course meal made from the finest ingredients yet still leaving them slightly hungry.

Then again, hunger is at the heart of the play. Each of the characters is driven by it – hunger for pleasure, food, connection. Mostly, though, they hunger for transformation: physical for some, deeper and unspoken for others.

The play, which the program describes as set “somewhere in America. Bigger than a town, smaller than a city,” follows Chris (a compelling, multi-layered Sheldon D. Brown), a man in his early 30s who has apparently suffered an accident that has radically altered his relationship to food. Once disgusted by the thought of eating, he is now pulled into an obsessive online community of food lovers, where culinary passion blurs into fixation and identity begins to dissolve.

Sheldon D. Brown as Chris and Anne Gee Byrd as Cindy in South Coast Repertory's 2026 world premiere production of "Eat Me." Photo courtesy of SCR/Robert Huskey

As he becomes increasingly consumed by the pursuit and performance of “perfect” eating, those around him – friends, family and romantic entanglements – are also navigating their own physical and emotional transformations. The play traces a world where hunger for food, meaning and self-reinvention overlap, raising unsettling questions about consumption, control and what it means to truly be satisfied.

Nearly every character is undergoing some form of change, though those shifts are never fully realized on stage (just as how a play so enmeshed with food shows no actual food or eating). Chris, the central figure, is described as enduring a seismic physical change by his sister Beatrice (a very strong Kacie Rogers), perhaps a dramatic weight gain, though he appears unchanged; the same is Beatrice, who is pregnant. There’s also Stevie (a likeable, albeit kind of creepy Jake Borelli), Chris’ fledgling romance, a recovering alcoholic with an uneasy fixation on his body. Then there is Jen (a conflicted Carolyn Ratteray), Beatrice’s wife, intent on reshaping her body through exercise.

The only two characters who don’t seem to be transitioning from one state to another are the mysterious Gourmand (a wonderfully stentorian and gravitas-imbued Jeorge Bennett Watson), Chris’ online Pied Piper of sorts, who is consumed by the pleasure of eating and draws Chris further into the transformative, curated world of consumption.

That leaves Cindy (a pitch-perfect Anne Gee Byrd), Chris’ elderly roommate – but even that stability is deceptive. She recounts one of the most startling transformations of all: an 18-month period shortly after she moved to New York City in which she shifted from a “good” girl, drinking milk and going to church, into a shadowy, beast-like figure she likens to an armadillo “banging her head against walls” and engaging in chaotic sexual encounters involving women and gay men. That’s a far cry from her present life, where she mostly stays home, watches reality series and documentaries, and obsessively tends to her cats, Eleanor Roosevelt and Coconut Joe, as well as her dead cat Milo, who may or may not be as dead as she believes.

Kacie Rogers as Beatrice and Carolyn Ratteray as Jen in "Eat Me." Photo by Robert Huskey/SCR.

By the way, Milo was also Cindy’s soulmate of sorts, which is what she now realizes Chris is. However, the two could not seem more different. Whereas Chris orders food for Stevie at a new Italian restaurant like a Roman conqueror methodically planning a siege of Troy, culminating in an ungodly amount of food that results in Stevie vomiting at its extravagance, Cindy seems to live on cheese sticks, iceberg lettuce and Diet Coke.

As the play progresses, it becomes clear that Chris’ preoccupation with the “perfect culinary experience” is less, as he describes it, a form of education in haute cuisine than it is an obsession. He has left his job as an administrative lawyer with no plans to return and begins spending recklessly on high-end food. It sabotages his nascent relationship with Stevie and strains his connection to his pregnant sister; everything else recedes behind a mounting need to experience what members of the Subreddit describe as the “restaurant at the top of the world,” a mysterious eatery said to sit on an Alaskan glacier, where an elderly woman descended from Indigenous ancestors prepares fish caught in glacial waters.

Sheldon D. Brown as Chris, left, and Jeorge Bennett Watson as Gourmand in "Eat Me." Photo courtesy of SCR/Robert Huskey

There is a great deal to unpack in the play’s story and its metaphors, with frequent allusions to wild animals, consumption and the mythology of food itself. But the production is taut and controlled: Characters mostly sit in pools of light (courtesy of lighting designer Isabella Byrd), lending an air of quiet foreboding to the proceedings. Evan Cook’s sound design is portentous if not always fully cohesive. Caitlin Sullivan’s direction is precise and suitably spooky, and the performances are uniformly strong, particularly those of Chris and the enigmatic Gourmand.

There is also some impressive scenic design courtesy of Nicholas Pandolfi, when Chris finally reaches the aforementioned world-topping restaurant (or does he?), as the stage is instantly transformed from simple domesticity into an Arctic landscape.

It then ends as it begins, with Cindy sitting alone recounting a tale.

It’s a bizarre play, but a compelling one, well written and uncompromising in its vision, which is never explicit but consistently demands that the audience wrestle with the material. It may not be conventionally entertaining (some audience members visibly squirm during its more extreme moments), but for those engaged, they will realize they’ve seen something distinctive. Like a rich meal, it lingers; you may not be sure you’ve fully digested it yet, but you know it won’t leave you quickly.