“Food is my worst enemy.” / “Food is my best friend.” / “Food is anesthesia.” / “Food is temptation.” /
“Food is everything.”
Hunger
90 minutes · 7 women (can be done with 6)
Hunger is not a traditional narrative play, but rather a combination of monologues, dialogue, and ritualistic, theatrical staging aimed at illuminating the characters’ struggles with food, weight, and eating disorders.The all-female cast consists of a college professor, four students, and the “shadow” figure of one of the students, representing all the parts of herself that she denies. The characters cover the spectrum of eating disorders, including a bulimic, a compulsive over-eater, an anorexic who is in touch with her distress, and an anorexic who is in denial.
Fran is thin and frail, having struggled with anorexia for several years. Her parents were “fitness freaks” and preoccupied with their own appearances, as well as those of their children. Fran is a lost soul who doesn’t know who she is or what she wants. She goes through life with a chronic sense of fear. To compensate for this she is a people-pleaser and a perfectionist.
Abby is an overweight compulsive eater. She has been fat all her life, with a family that made fun of her and tried to stop her over-eating with insults and constant nagging. She has strength that is buried under her self-loathing, but she has never had the courage to live the life she really wants.
Julie lives on an emotional roller-coaster. She falls passionately in love and is devastated when a relationship ends. She is confused and ambivalent — she wants to eat but is afraid of gaining weight. Facing rejection by her boyfriend, she became bulimic. She loves that she can eat and maintain her weight, but is ashamed about her destructive patterns.
Caroline is the epitome of success: thin, pretty, an outstanding student, and the captain of the track team. She is also anorexic but denies this — to herself as well as to everyone else. Caroline has a “Shadow” figure whom no one on stage can see. The “Shadow” represents all of Caroline’s aspects of herself that she denies. She acts out Caroline’s fears, aspirations, and hungers.
Nadia, the professor, was named for the gymnast Nadia Comaneci. She has had a lifelong battle with her body, beginning with her parents’ desire for her to be a gymnast and ballerina, activities for which her body was completely inadequate. Later, her step-father molested her, and in an attempt to lose her budding woman’s figure, she developed an eating disorder.
The characters reveal the histories of their problems, their family dynamics, and the impact of their issues on their lives through monologues and dialogue. And Nadia leads them through a series of experiences — some straightforward, some surrealistic — designed to promote insight and growth. Each actress (except for the one playing the Shadow) plays multiple roles, as the characters act out each other’s mothers, or the conflicting voices within each of them, or the fears in a dream of Caroline’s, or their bodies talking back to them, or the witch who serves the Goddess of the Scale to whom they all must bow down.
The characters explore their relationships with food, the scale, their bodies, pleasure, fear, themselves, their families, and social pressures to be thin, ultimately discovering what it is that they truly hunger for. By the end, the characters have begun their healing, except for one who dies because she could not face the truth about herself.
FULL-LENGTH DRAMAS
MUSICALS
ONE-ACT PLAYS
SHORT PLAYS