Review: Quite the Mouthful: There’s Plenty to Savor in “Women Who Eat”

Women Who Eat

Written by Devin Davis-Lorton

Directed by Laura Bertrand and Jack Callahan

Presented by Chorus Girl Productions in collaboration with Point Blank Productions at Theaterlab Atelier

357 W 36th St., Floor 4, Manhattan, NYC

October 22–November 8, 2026

Before anyone opens their mouths – let alone speaks – in Women Who Eat, plates of half-eaten food sit on a table in the Seaside Center for Recovery. As we audience filed into the theater, pre-show house staff directed those who wished to avoid gore to stage left, away from those would-be thrill seekers on stage right. Under these portentous auspices, the production’s glaring white room takes on an ominous aura. Almost directly situated in front of a few tight rows of seats, the space has the economical furnishings of a vaguely menacing institutional space: a bookcase, beanbag chairs, and a weathered desk, complete with a worn copy of Infinite Jest and an uneaten apple – Chekov’s Edenic totem in a play whose script announces that the first sin was a woman who ate. Flooding white lighting exposes every corner, leaving the patients (and audience) little room to escape one another’s attention. Later, when the blood finally comes, it has nowhere to disappear to, revealing that the house staff’s warnings applied as much to the physical gore itself as to the intensity of intimacy between viewers and actors in this production.

Devin Davis-Lorton’s explosive, dynamic play, directed by Laura Bertrand and Jack Callahan, places six young patients undergoing treatment for eating disorders on an island off the Maine coast. Dr. Walsh, M.D. PhD. (Ben Turch) presides over a facility regulating even bathroom visits, while Nurse Francis (Shane Weikel) is sexually entangled with one of the patients. A boat brings two new arrivals: Charleston Harvey’s Nico, whose subtle, steady presence deftly enables the audience to see inside the facility through the eyes of an outsider; and Davis-Lorton’s Alex, whose reunion with former lover Liv reopens an already tempestuous relationship. And the storm hasn’t just blown indoors – outside, an especially violent hurricane fast approaches the isolated island; the power fails, communications lines are found severed, and the emergency radio is discovered smashed. Suspicion falls on the gently looming yet classically comic, buffoonish Dr. Walsh, whom the patients promptly tie up while Francis abandons them to swim, Speedo-clad, for help. Walsh’s paternalism makes him easy to distrust, although whether he truly engineered the sabotage remains unresolved.

With most of the eight performers visible for long stretches, the crowded stage gives small actions unusual importance. Alexandra Tejada makes Erin’s frantic “pee-pee dance” and her lament that she has yet to win a Tony genuinely funny, adroitly keeping the character both vulnerable and appealing. She is also the group’s exuberant chorus, meeting each new danger with an astonishing capacity for excitement. Rachel Sedlak provides a quieter center as Chrys (hiding under a table during the thunder and carefully covering discarded snacks with napkins), but her natural charisma and magnetism inevitably pull in fellow inpatients and audience members alike. Ashley Abrams keeps Gia’s sardonic, caustic presence palpable even when the action is on the other side of the dayroom. These performances give the dialogue’s breakneck pace a fitting physical counterpoint.

Still in their grippy socks, the patients transform captivity into one (literal) hell of a sleepover. They trade new names, build pillow forts, and produce illicit cigarettes all at once (one of the evening’s many tight, effective visual gags). Their newfound freedom, however, quickly develops rules of its own. Liv, who had previously feigned muteness, reinvents herself as Queenie, and Megan Alexandra plays her with a seductive, increasingly despotic authority. Her contemptuous commands and drawn-out demands for apology turn familiar gestures of intimacy into instruments of control. Queenie first leads a vote to throw away the food so no one can binge, making obedience a condition of belonging.

Davis-Lorton’s dialogue moves with the speed of an online conversation, ricocheting among slang, cultural deep cuts, and self-aware wisecracks, throughout which the cast members find their individuality through physical presences and glimpses of vulnerability. As Alex, Davis-Lorton offers one such moment via her “beer for dinner” monologue: a funny and unexpectedly sad account of turning an empty refrigerator into a personal celebration.

In perhaps the production’s strongest sequence, Queenie, Gia, and Erin make a ceremony of throwing the facility’s food into the sea, beginning with declarations of “grace” for snacks and forbidden pleasures. Their invocations grow steadily more intimate, taking in absent loved ones, disappointed mothers, and the difficulty of forgiving themselves. Red and pink streamers erupt from the tossed provisions, and the sacrifice becomes a dance. Their repeated refrain “grace for me” feels markedly gutting against the play’s unrelenting aggression.

Eleven days after the food has been discarded, the nearly inevitable ensues as Queenie proposes killing a particular person as a ritual of collective rebirth. When she warns that “you’re either IN or you’re next,” the supposed sisterhood reveals its terms. Admitting that “it still feels nice to be included,” their pleasure in belonging is persuasive, which makes its conditions all the crueler.

In the end, we get both Testaments. The production’s initial religious imagery culminates in a grotesquely inverted communion. A supposed traitor receives forgiveness, and flesh is consumed. Queenie calls the body bread and wine; Erin offers the more practical comparison of steak tartare. Tejada earns another laugh just before the first bite, when Erin suddenly remembers that she is vegetarian. The gore effects are gloriously repellent, with sticky flesh and blood that marks each performer differently. Against the white room, the “girls” appear almost sanctified, their separate bodies carrying evidence of a shared act.

Turch makes Walsh both burly and problematically cozy, an ambiguity made increasingly uncomfortable by the treatment he undergoes, and his doubling as a second character, the Fisherman, suggests a grotesque resurrection. An offstage harmonica heard early in the performance prepares his arrival, and Turch delivers his sea shanty with impressive gusto. The Fisherman’s torrent of maritime references and fractured associations departs from the play’s established language by a nautical mile, with Turch’s committed performance making the detour wholly worthwhile.

The Fisherman might offer rescue, but the patients gradually encircle him. Alex asks if he has anything to eat: “My sisters and I are starving.” The lights go out before anyone decides what to do with their visitor. This cabal, having remade themselves and their community amidst this storm, are still starving, another body now at the center of the circle. With new flesh for the old ceremony, we wonder: could sustenance possibly be a mere meal away for this awakened apatite without end? A toothsome matter left unresolved as the audience files out into the dark eve.

-Noah Simon Jampol