Here is a review of one of the best play I have seen in quite a while. "Eat Me". Please go and see it!!
Wrecked
Looking behind images of torture
by Judith Lewis
Exactly halfway through Jacqueline Wrights Eat Me, everyone in the audience capable of rational thought or sympathy must be feeling theyve had enough. By this time, the protagonist, Tommy, played by Wright herself, has attempted suicide by chomping down sedatives she eats from a bowl like popcorn while she giggles over reruns of Mayberry R.F.D.; Frank (Tony Forkush), one of the two men who break into her apartment while she lies unconscious on her tattered living room sofa, has tried to rape her; the other, Bob (David Ojalvo), has gleefully bound her hands and feet. While Frank is out getting snacks, Bob celebrates Tommys return to consciousness by gagging her with his penis (she vomits, apologizes), dragging her around her squalid apartment by a leash made from his belt, and forcing her to eat out of the cat food dish while singing the meow-meow song from the famous Meow Mix commercial. (I dont know it, she protests. Everyone knows it! he insists. Sing it!) The brutality is worse for the whimsy. Like the now-iconic image of Private Lynndie England in a playful shooting posture, cigarette dangling from her smiling lips as she aims an imaginary gun at a naked prisoners genitals, it reminds us what none of us ever wants to admit: Relieved of any sense of conscience or responsibility, a person might find that torturing another human is fun.
But just at the point when it becomes too much to endure, Eat Mes plot turns inside out: At the climax of Bobs cruelty, Tommy rises, bloodied, staggering and invigorated by the concreteness of physical pain humiliation was harder to take as well as the revelation that Bob has nothing left. Hes insulted her, beaten her and urinated on her; hes called her names, choked her, threatened to drown her. To a woman who so recently awoke to the disappointment that she was still breathing, its still not much. I never thought Id meet a bigger loser than me, she mutters to herself when she realizes she no longer cares what Bob does to her, and proceeds to deliver a monologue as eloquent as it is profane about Bobs origins in excrement. Watching and listening as Tommy spits her words through blood and her lingering grogginess, Bob begins to understand that he has nothing on her despair; shes as crazy as he is, maybe worse. His bellicose harangues continue, but they ring hollow. She mocks him; they fight; he breaks down. And slowly, incredibly but not implausibly, the distance closes between them.
On the night I saw the play, early in its run at Theater of NOTE, I noticed that the only people laughing were men, a fact worth noting not because men are cold-blooded and evil, but because women may have had an easier time imagining themselves in Tommys place. Wright gives the role a comic edge few other actors could imitate; you can imagine someone with less nuanced timing ruining some of her more earnest lines and mangling the roles physicality, which at times is more important than the dialogue. Under Chris Fields direction, Wrights Tommy is strangely enchanting; its not hard to feel for her. The laughter was maddening. But Wright didnt create Eat Me to have it subjected to knee-jerk feminist analysis; if she had, she would have steered it in the direction of so many stories about mens violence against women, ending in a triumphant escape or tragic death. Instead, she does something much more delicate, and more radically humane: She strips the torturer of his power to control. Its not an easy trick, and not a flawlessly executed one Eat Me almost unavoidably jumps from viciousness to compassion too abruptly but its a useful thought with which to contemplate a world larger than the problem of violent men and helpless women.
It seems dangerous to make too much of this Eat Me is, after all, a small play about a complicated and misery-fraught relationship between two utterly wrecked people but its also just true: I couldnt watch Bob cinch his belt around Tommys neck and force her to crawl like the cat that you are without confronting some of the same emotions a similar image from Abu Ghraib evoked. And I couldnt think about the play without reflecting on some of the same quandaries about futility and power that face any conscious reader of the daily newspaper. What does it mean when authority falls to hopeless and demoralized people? What happens when threats of death and torture fail to sufficiently intimidate people whose lives are so ruined they have nothing left to lose? Tommy, unarmed and slight, becomes dangerous to Bob when he realizes she welcomes death; Bob, whom Ojalvo initially plays with the rowdy hatefulness we associate with the people we call rednecks, has much in common with those prison guards at Abu Ghraib, hillbilly anomalies in an otherwise sane and sophisticated system. We may wonder how they got that way; Wright reminds us the reasons run deep.
So much of Eat Me goes against prevailing wisdom about violence, its perpetrators and victims that its destined to be labeled controversial and anger some sensitive viewers. And yet so much of it makes some sort of brave and uncompromising sense that its impossible to dismiss the play as either exploitation or antifeminist backlash. (In fact, I came to conclude that its not about gender politics at all, which is perhaps why Wright gave her woman a mans name.) As Tommy and Bobs scarred histories push through a process that starts when he berates her for not having written a suicide note and presumes to write one on her behalf were reminded that cruelty to oneself and others comes from the same place of unexpressed suffering, a place that exists in every one of us to some degree. The audience may find that an uncomfortable revelation; so do Tommy and Bob. And that may be Eat Mes cruelest, and most vivid, point: The knowledge that restrains us, collectively or individually, from bringing pain and ruin to others lives may also make it impossible for us to go on living. Told to the murmur of Martin Carillos piano music and a television stuck ominously on afternoon reruns an element that underscores the vaguely sickening mood its a devastating story. Like so many devastating stories well told, however, Eat Me is ultimately enriching. If you dont turn away from it, you leave knowing youve witnessed something whose implications are bigger than its modest parts.
EAT ME | By JACQUELINE WRIGHT | At the McCADDEN PLACE THEATER, 1157 McCadden Place, Hollywood | (323) 856-8611 Through September 18
Wright at home at Theater
of NOTE
(Photo by Joe Foster)
An interview with the playright:
Taking Offense
Jacqueline Wright and her polarizing play Eat Me
by Steven Leigh Morris
Jacqueline Wrights graphic play Eat Me about a suicidal woman living in squalor whos brutalized by two rapists sets off explosions wherever it goes. When it was given a workshop production at New Yorks Ensemble Studio Theater in 1998, half the audience left during the performances. When the play was read seven years ago in Hollywood for Theater of NOTEs Play Selection Committee, one member stormed out saying that he didnt wish to be in the same room as the playwright.
Wright is quick to add that shes received enormous support from various art boards over the years at Theater of NOTE, which, after seven years, finally hosted the plays premiere earlier this month as a member rental. This means that the theater allowed Wright to rent the venue at a cut rate, but did not actually produce the play for reasons having as much to do with its small cast as its content, Wright points out. (NOTE did produce Wrights play Bing in 2001.) Because of prior scheduling commitments at NOTE, the production of Eat Me moved to the McCadden Place Theater last week.
Eat Me searches with an intense beam of light for some causes of human behavior and misery. With Wrights grimy, absurdist wit, victim and victimizer start to find traces of shared humanity during their brutal encounter. And though the play suffers from a drift toward sentimental shores, its an honest groping for answers thats been rudely mistaken by some detractors for the cheap dramatization of an ugly thrill.
Wright says that she wrote the play her third when she was 26 (shes now 33). The play includes onstage fellatio, followed by the victims apologetic vomiting and a stabbing. She showed it first to her husband, Joe Foster, who, though impressed by the writing, told her, I dont know if we can do this. She then sent it to her mother, who told her it was the best thing shed ever written. She showed it to director Matt Almos, who told her that Theater of NOTE with its reputation for adventurousness was probably the only theater in town that would even consider it. With that idea in mind, Wright joined Theater of NOTE in 1997. For seven successive years, Eat Me was championed by some art board members, and ultimately rejected for production.
Curiously, the most vituperative complaints have come from men.
These people felt I sat down at my desk and thought, How can I write something evil and mean and bad. I think it really comes from the way we attach meaning to things that make us Right and Good, says the L.A. resident. I think thats limiting.
Eat Me was completed two years after Wright finished her theater studies at CalArts. Its the second play she produced in two years in which she plays the leading role. The L.A. wing of Ensemble Studio Theater produced her Buddy Buddette, a fantasia about a comic book heroine, last year. But the despondent, brutalized, sodomized heroine of Eat Me is a long way from the high school cheerleading squads and Superwoman costume changes of Buddy Buddette.
Despite or because of its volatility, Eat Mes first month filled Theater of NOTE with new audience members. People are asking if they can pay by credit card. These are not our regular audiences. In almost 30 years of doing business, NOTE has never had a credit-card machine, says Wright.
She adds that there have been groups of Russians throwing money at the stage, and Latinos (one group walked out) and older people. Of particular delight to Wright is how women of all ages have been so receptive to the play.
The lingering and probably unanswerable question is where, in Wrights soul, did this play come from? Wright was born in Florida, the daughter of a U.S. Navy pilot and an airline flight attendant, which means she lived for fits of time in many corners of America. After her father retired, he eventually became a newspaper publisher in Lebanon, Missouri, where Wright spent her summers following her parents divorce. (Those summers provided Wright with some geographic stability and continuity.)
Wright says she doesnt understand where the play came from that it just came pouring out. I dont edit or censor when I write, she explains. Sometimes I dont even know whats coming out, or why.
She says she remains extremely close with both parents, though her fathers kind of mad at me right now. He wants to fly out to see the play, but Wright has been actively discouraging him.
If I wasnt in it, it would be different. It just crosses a lot of lines. The daddy-daughter relationship. His girlfriend came out and she dug it. I told him that our relationship is as healthy as I can imagine and that this would be funky . . . yes, I banned him, basically.
Wrecked
Looking behind images of torture
by Judith Lewis
Exactly halfway through Jacqueline Wrights Eat Me, everyone in the audience capable of rational thought or sympathy must be feeling theyve had enough. By this time, the protagonist, Tommy, played by Wright herself, has attempted suicide by chomping down sedatives she eats from a bowl like popcorn while she giggles over reruns of Mayberry R.F.D.; Frank (Tony Forkush), one of the two men who break into her apartment while she lies unconscious on her tattered living room sofa, has tried to rape her; the other, Bob (David Ojalvo), has gleefully bound her hands and feet. While Frank is out getting snacks, Bob celebrates Tommys return to consciousness by gagging her with his penis (she vomits, apologizes), dragging her around her squalid apartment by a leash made from his belt, and forcing her to eat out of the cat food dish while singing the meow-meow song from the famous Meow Mix commercial. (I dont know it, she protests. Everyone knows it! he insists. Sing it!) The brutality is worse for the whimsy. Like the now-iconic image of Private Lynndie England in a playful shooting posture, cigarette dangling from her smiling lips as she aims an imaginary gun at a naked prisoners genitals, it reminds us what none of us ever wants to admit: Relieved of any sense of conscience or responsibility, a person might find that torturing another human is fun.
But just at the point when it becomes too much to endure, Eat Mes plot turns inside out: At the climax of Bobs cruelty, Tommy rises, bloodied, staggering and invigorated by the concreteness of physical pain humiliation was harder to take as well as the revelation that Bob has nothing left. Hes insulted her, beaten her and urinated on her; hes called her names, choked her, threatened to drown her. To a woman who so recently awoke to the disappointment that she was still breathing, its still not much. I never thought Id meet a bigger loser than me, she mutters to herself when she realizes she no longer cares what Bob does to her, and proceeds to deliver a monologue as eloquent as it is profane about Bobs origins in excrement. Watching and listening as Tommy spits her words through blood and her lingering grogginess, Bob begins to understand that he has nothing on her despair; shes as crazy as he is, maybe worse. His bellicose harangues continue, but they ring hollow. She mocks him; they fight; he breaks down. And slowly, incredibly but not implausibly, the distance closes between them.
On the night I saw the play, early in its run at Theater of NOTE, I noticed that the only people laughing were men, a fact worth noting not because men are cold-blooded and evil, but because women may have had an easier time imagining themselves in Tommys place. Wright gives the role a comic edge few other actors could imitate; you can imagine someone with less nuanced timing ruining some of her more earnest lines and mangling the roles physicality, which at times is more important than the dialogue. Under Chris Fields direction, Wrights Tommy is strangely enchanting; its not hard to feel for her. The laughter was maddening. But Wright didnt create Eat Me to have it subjected to knee-jerk feminist analysis; if she had, she would have steered it in the direction of so many stories about mens violence against women, ending in a triumphant escape or tragic death. Instead, she does something much more delicate, and more radically humane: She strips the torturer of his power to control. Its not an easy trick, and not a flawlessly executed one Eat Me almost unavoidably jumps from viciousness to compassion too abruptly but its a useful thought with which to contemplate a world larger than the problem of violent men and helpless women.
It seems dangerous to make too much of this Eat Me is, after all, a small play about a complicated and misery-fraught relationship between two utterly wrecked people but its also just true: I couldnt watch Bob cinch his belt around Tommys neck and force her to crawl like the cat that you are without confronting some of the same emotions a similar image from Abu Ghraib evoked. And I couldnt think about the play without reflecting on some of the same quandaries about futility and power that face any conscious reader of the daily newspaper. What does it mean when authority falls to hopeless and demoralized people? What happens when threats of death and torture fail to sufficiently intimidate people whose lives are so ruined they have nothing left to lose? Tommy, unarmed and slight, becomes dangerous to Bob when he realizes she welcomes death; Bob, whom Ojalvo initially plays with the rowdy hatefulness we associate with the people we call rednecks, has much in common with those prison guards at Abu Ghraib, hillbilly anomalies in an otherwise sane and sophisticated system. We may wonder how they got that way; Wright reminds us the reasons run deep.
So much of Eat Me goes against prevailing wisdom about violence, its perpetrators and victims that its destined to be labeled controversial and anger some sensitive viewers. And yet so much of it makes some sort of brave and uncompromising sense that its impossible to dismiss the play as either exploitation or antifeminist backlash. (In fact, I came to conclude that its not about gender politics at all, which is perhaps why Wright gave her woman a mans name.) As Tommy and Bobs scarred histories push through a process that starts when he berates her for not having written a suicide note and presumes to write one on her behalf were reminded that cruelty to oneself and others comes from the same place of unexpressed suffering, a place that exists in every one of us to some degree. The audience may find that an uncomfortable revelation; so do Tommy and Bob. And that may be Eat Mes cruelest, and most vivid, point: The knowledge that restrains us, collectively or individually, from bringing pain and ruin to others lives may also make it impossible for us to go on living. Told to the murmur of Martin Carillos piano music and a television stuck ominously on afternoon reruns an element that underscores the vaguely sickening mood its a devastating story. Like so many devastating stories well told, however, Eat Me is ultimately enriching. If you dont turn away from it, you leave knowing youve witnessed something whose implications are bigger than its modest parts.
EAT ME | By JACQUELINE WRIGHT | At the McCADDEN PLACE THEATER, 1157 McCadden Place, Hollywood | (323) 856-8611 Through September 18
Wright at home at Theater
of NOTE
(Photo by Joe Foster)
An interview with the playright:
Taking Offense
Jacqueline Wright and her polarizing play Eat Me
by Steven Leigh Morris
Jacqueline Wrights graphic play Eat Me about a suicidal woman living in squalor whos brutalized by two rapists sets off explosions wherever it goes. When it was given a workshop production at New Yorks Ensemble Studio Theater in 1998, half the audience left during the performances. When the play was read seven years ago in Hollywood for Theater of NOTEs Play Selection Committee, one member stormed out saying that he didnt wish to be in the same room as the playwright.
Wright is quick to add that shes received enormous support from various art boards over the years at Theater of NOTE, which, after seven years, finally hosted the plays premiere earlier this month as a member rental. This means that the theater allowed Wright to rent the venue at a cut rate, but did not actually produce the play for reasons having as much to do with its small cast as its content, Wright points out. (NOTE did produce Wrights play Bing in 2001.) Because of prior scheduling commitments at NOTE, the production of Eat Me moved to the McCadden Place Theater last week.
Eat Me searches with an intense beam of light for some causes of human behavior and misery. With Wrights grimy, absurdist wit, victim and victimizer start to find traces of shared humanity during their brutal encounter. And though the play suffers from a drift toward sentimental shores, its an honest groping for answers thats been rudely mistaken by some detractors for the cheap dramatization of an ugly thrill.
Wright says that she wrote the play her third when she was 26 (shes now 33). The play includes onstage fellatio, followed by the victims apologetic vomiting and a stabbing. She showed it first to her husband, Joe Foster, who, though impressed by the writing, told her, I dont know if we can do this. She then sent it to her mother, who told her it was the best thing shed ever written. She showed it to director Matt Almos, who told her that Theater of NOTE with its reputation for adventurousness was probably the only theater in town that would even consider it. With that idea in mind, Wright joined Theater of NOTE in 1997. For seven successive years, Eat Me was championed by some art board members, and ultimately rejected for production.
Curiously, the most vituperative complaints have come from men.
These people felt I sat down at my desk and thought, How can I write something evil and mean and bad. I think it really comes from the way we attach meaning to things that make us Right and Good, says the L.A. resident. I think thats limiting.
Eat Me was completed two years after Wright finished her theater studies at CalArts. Its the second play she produced in two years in which she plays the leading role. The L.A. wing of Ensemble Studio Theater produced her Buddy Buddette, a fantasia about a comic book heroine, last year. But the despondent, brutalized, sodomized heroine of Eat Me is a long way from the high school cheerleading squads and Superwoman costume changes of Buddy Buddette.
Despite or because of its volatility, Eat Mes first month filled Theater of NOTE with new audience members. People are asking if they can pay by credit card. These are not our regular audiences. In almost 30 years of doing business, NOTE has never had a credit-card machine, says Wright.
She adds that there have been groups of Russians throwing money at the stage, and Latinos (one group walked out) and older people. Of particular delight to Wright is how women of all ages have been so receptive to the play.
The lingering and probably unanswerable question is where, in Wrights soul, did this play come from? Wright was born in Florida, the daughter of a U.S. Navy pilot and an airline flight attendant, which means she lived for fits of time in many corners of America. After her father retired, he eventually became a newspaper publisher in Lebanon, Missouri, where Wright spent her summers following her parents divorce. (Those summers provided Wright with some geographic stability and continuity.)
Wright says she doesnt understand where the play came from that it just came pouring out. I dont edit or censor when I write, she explains. Sometimes I dont even know whats coming out, or why.
She says she remains extremely close with both parents, though her fathers kind of mad at me right now. He wants to fly out to see the play, but Wright has been actively discouraging him.
If I wasnt in it, it would be different. It just crosses a lot of lines. The daddy-daughter relationship. His girlfriend came out and she dug it. I told him that our relationship is as healthy as I can imagine and that this would be funky . . . yes, I banned him, basically.