A HUNGER THAT DOESN’T
QUITE NAME ITSELF

A sharp new play still discovering its center

Lewis Carroll understood that eating is never just eating. When Alice stands before the small cake and weighs the risk, she is doing what everyone in Talene Monahon’s Eat Me does across this hundred-minute production: measuring the cost of wanting something against the cost of not having it, and trying to decide which debt is larger. Carroll’s answer, quoted in the epigraph Monahon places before the script, is essentially pragmatic. Either way, Alice gets into the garden. What the play adds, under Caitlin Sullivan’s direction at South Coast Repertory’s Julianne Argyros Stage, is the question Carroll didn’t ask: what happens to the woman who has been standing outside the garden for forty years, refusing the cake and telling herself she was never hungry in the first place?

That woman is Cindy, and Los Angeles stage veteran Anne Gee Byrd plays her with the authority of someone who has lived inside this character for years. She is in an armchair when the lights come up, a lamp off, a Diet Coke at her elbow. The Diet Coke matters. It sits there through the evening like a gauge, measuring the temperature of Cindy’s relationship to pleasure, which is disciplined, severe, and total. When she finally turns on the lamp and begins to speak, it is to tell us about Milo, her cat, who died after eight days of refusing food. The audience does not yet know Milo is a cat. For a long, careful stretch, he could be a child, a husband, a lover: always hungry, waking her at six in the morning for breakfast, greeting guests at the door, loving attention. When the reveal comes, the laugh is reflexive, but Byrd does not chase it. She stays inside the grief. “That was the most painful thing,” she says, and the line lands because she never treats it as metaphor. Cindy is talking about the tuna that crusted to the bowl and would not come off. She is also talking about everything else. Byrd never signals the second meaning. She trusts us to find it. The scene is exceptional.

Sitting in the Argyros’s close dark, you feel the pleasure of watching an actor of Byrd’s intelligence work at this level. She does almost nothing that announces itself. Her Cindy monitors, catalogues, adjudicates. She lights cigarettes with the practiced efficiency of someone who has negotiated her vices down to the ones she has decided are acceptable. When Chris brings a date home and she retreats behind her white noise machine, you already know exactly what that apartment looks like at two in the morning: the glow under two doors, everyone sealed in separate rooms, the Diet Coke cans lined up in the fridge like judgment.

Alongside Cindy, occupying her living room but also other spaces at once, is Chris, her roommate and best friend, played by Sheldon D. Brown in his SCR debut. Sullivan builds the production around the fact that Chris and Cindy share a stage while existing in different times and scenes, and she handles that layering with restraint. Chris goes on dates. Cindy watches a baking competition from her chair. The Gourmand materializes out of a Reddit forum into the same physical space, and Sullivan never overexplains the device. When Cindy peers over at a restaurant table that exists only in the pool of light around Chris and remarks, flat as pavement, that she has never heard of this place, the laugh is huge. Beneath it is something sadder: Cindy pays attention because attention is the only form of love she fully trusts herself to offer.

Brown’s Chris is post-event in ways the play is slow to clarify. Something happened to him—some medical crisis or collapse—and when he came out of it he was different about food: ravenous, exacting, newly acquisitive, capable of ordering an entire Cornish hen for himself at the end of a date’s menu and asking that it be placed on his side of the table. Brown plays this hunger not as appetite but as argument, the way someone argues after discovering, late in life, that desire was always allowed. You believe this is a man who was once more closed off and has since cracked open in one direction while remaining sealed everywhere else. That sealed quality matters. The play depends on it. It is also where the writing occasionally lets Brown down, giving him attitudes before fully supplying the actions that would make them inevitable.

Jeorge Bennett Watson’s Gourmand is one of the production’s genuine triumphs. He appears as waiter, internet oracle, and spirit of excess, sometimes all three at once, and Watson moves between them without seam. His food recitations have the quality of a man reading scripture in a language he invented, and they accumulate over the evening into something close to a fever. When he describes a meal in the Slovenian countryside—three Michelin stars, an orzotto bathed in goat cheese with black truffles foraged a few feet away—he is not boasting. He is bearing witness. In the restaurant scenes, he is also very funny. His pause before telling the men that he is about to give them “the greatest gift any of us could ask for” and then landing on the word “time” is a small masterpiece of comic placement.

Jake Borelli, fresh off eight seasons on Grey’s Anatomy, brings to Stevie the precise comic intelligence the role needs. Stevie’s dietary ethics are organized around the concept of soul presence, which he applies selectively to fish, and Borelli delivers this theology with the deadpan seriousness of a man who has spent years refining an argument he knows other people will mock. The sole joke lands exactly because Borelli never leans on it. The scene in which Chris and Stevie navigate this theology over menus, with Cindy watching from her chair and Watson hovering at the edge of the table, is the production’s first fully realized sequence: funny on the surface, quietly devastating underneath, and alive to the play’s real concerns without ever announcing them.

Eat Me is ultimately less about appetite than refusal: what each character will not permit themselves, and the damage that accumulates in the distance between wanting and allowing. For much of its running time, Monahon handles this with intelligence and real theatrical invention. Then the play hits a soft patch.

The problem lies mainly in the Beatrice–Jen scenes. Kacie Rogers plays Beatrice, Chris’s pregnant sister, with sharp control, and Carolyn Ratteray gives Jen a grounded warmth. Both are good. But these scenes ask them to carry too much exposition: Chris’s medical history, his finances, his withdrawal from work and family. The play knows Beatrice is right to worry. It never fully dramatizes why she has waited this long to force the issue. As a result, the confrontation lands with less force than it should.

The deeper issue is that Eat Me is more comfortable identifying Cindy’s relationship to food than pressing into it. Monahon is a careful writer, and that restraint is often a strength, but here it creates distance at exactly the point where the play should move closer. The sharpest image in the script comes when Beatrice opens the shared fridge and inventories its contents: iceberg lettuce, low-fat ranch, cheese sticks, and then, on another shelf, a small tin of four-hundred-dollar caviar. That image says nearly everything. It should arrive earlier and matter more.

None of this is reason to stay home. Byrd alone is worth the trip, and the best scenes—especially the date and the riveting finale—more than justify the evening.

Eat Me is also one of the rare recent plays that treats its characters’ bodies with genuine discretion. Monahon’s production note is categorical: changes in weight, pregnancy, or physical condition should not be literalized onstage, and actors of any body type can play any role. Sullivan honors that without fuss. The result is that the play’s discussions of appetite and bodily change remain where they belong: in behavior, language, shame, longing, and fear. You understand these people because of what they do and how they speak. That should be standard. In practice, it feels quietly radical.

Monahon comes to Costa Mesa as one of the hottest young writers now working in American theater. Her Meet the Cartozians, which opened at Second Stage last fall under David Cromer, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and landed on Vulture’s year-end top ten; her The Good John Proctor made The New Yorker’s best-of list in 2023. Eat Me is a world premiere, its first production anywhere, and what is happening at SCR right now is the process by which a play finds out what it is. The structural problems visible here—the soft middle, the Beatrice–Jen scenes weighted with exposition they cannot fully carry, the confrontation that needs to happen earlier and harder—are the kind that a writer of Monahon’s stature addresses in revision. I am betting she will have addressed them before this play reaches New York. And it will reach New York.

The Carroll logic holds through to the final image, which I will not spoil. Staying where you are can become its own kind of eating, a consumption so slow and total that the bowl looks clean. The bowl holds.

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photos by Robert Huskey

Eat Me
South Coast Repertory
655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
ends on May 3, 2026
for tickets ($36–$139), call 714.708.5555 or visit SCR

or more shows, visit Theatre in Los Angeles

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