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Review: ‘Eat Me’ doesn’t quite satisfy at South Coast Repertory

April 20, 2026

South Coast Repertory’s artistic rebound this season from a challenging stretch has made for a heartening revitalization at the Costa Mesa theater.

The company’s delve into narrative realism of the past through strongly focused, extended-run repertory mountings, most recently pairing the caustic “God of Carnage” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” proved an artistic kickstart.

Additionally, quite welcome news just arrived that for its 2026-2027 season SCR will return to a fulsome nine-production calendar — the most plays it has staged since 2018-2019.

Additionally, for the first time in the history of the theater, the company will employ its 94-seat Nicholas Studio space to stage a world premiere.

All this sets the scene for the season-closing Pacific Playwright’s Festival, an annual spring showcase of stagings and readings of new plays.

PPF remains the theater’s hallmark event in its longstanding mission of unveiling nascent works from developing writing voices. Aspirations often include fostering artistic experimentation in search of big risk/big reward work.

But undertaking that endeavor can sometimes head down the rabbit hole of enigmatic head-scratching.

And that’s perhaps the main takeaway from the cheekily titled comedy “Eat Me.”

Sheldon D. Brown and Anne Gee Byrd appear in a scene from “Eat Me” at South Coast Repertory. (Photo by Robert Huskey, SCR)

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Sheldon D. Brown and Anne Gee Byrd appear in a scene from “Eat Me” at South Coast Repertory. (Photo by Robert Huskey, SCR)

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Talene Monahon’s one-act, six-character play received a reading at last year’s festival and is now on dimly lit view on SCR’s smaller Argyros stage.

The backdrop for the somewhat puzzling thematic aura permeating the production is a most unlikely and rare real life health malady called “gourmand syndrome.”

(Failing any sources other than medical ones using “ganglia” and “cortex,” that scrupulously authoritative source Wikipedia succinctly describes “gourmand syndrome” as: “… a very rare and benign eating disorder that usually occurs six to 12 months after an injury to the frontal lobe. These people develop a new, post-injury passion for gourmet food.”)

Who knew? Likely, very few and perhaps that’s what heightened the appeal for Monahon to want to explore a phenomenon shared by many humans, which is stuffing their gobs as greedily as they can.

At 35, the playwright consistently appears on New York theater “ones to watch” lists and is forging a prolific career that defies categorization while coming up with delightfully eye-catching titles. (Next month, her new play, debuting in a Vermont village and adapted from a 1714 farce, is called “Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret”).

Here, in the helpful program notes, the articulate and self-aware Monahon says in writing this play she was not interested in “pathologizing disordered food behavior” but instead wanted to “convey the internal feeling of obsession.”

“Eat Me” toggles with the internal and external worlds of main character Chris (Sheldon D. Brown). In his 30s he is straying from studies in administrative law to mostly holing up in a dingy apartment with older roommate Cindy (Anne Gee Byrd) and her cats Eleanor Roosevelt and Coconut Joe.

But where Chris is increasingly living is inside his own headspace, with obsessive thoughts driven by an online subreddit foodie community personified for us as “The Gourmand” (Jeorge Bennett Watson).

Chris’ dominating obsession is fueled by taking refuge in The Gourmand’s ongoing self-indulgent exploits of jet-setting to far-flung ends of the Earth in a never-ending quest for the most exalted, no-expenses spared dining experiences.

As with many real-life internet obsessions, fantasy drives reality.

For instance, at a local top-end restaurant on a first date with Stevie (Jake Borelli), Chris orders — The Gourmand doing double duty here in obsequious waiter guise — 15 dishes, from the breadbasket with 20-year-old balsamic to Cornish Game Hen with Baby Turnips.

“I’m not actually that hungry,” murmurs the bemused, but not bored, Stevie. Chris waves him off — “I’m hungry” — though he solicitously inquires if Stevie would mind anchovy on the Gem salad.

Meantime, Chris’ pregnant sister Beatrice (Kacie Rogers) and her wife Jen (Carolyn Ratteray) are in their own nicer apartment, distressed at Chris drifting away from their contact.

Beatrice confronts Chris about how he’s doing. Plus, she is a bit alarmed about his money draining away in ongoing pursuit of his new infatuation with chewing.

But beyond this overview, neither established director Caitlin Sullivan nor most of the cast — largely SCR newcomers, their bios brim with TV and theater credits — are equipped with many opportunities to do much more than go through the plot’s pacing this play’s single act.

The peripheral characters are given no opening for growth or change. They are mostly assigned what feels a bit like random characteristics — this one has an overactive imagination; that one is training to run a marathon — maybe only there to fund conversation and flesh out scenes?

Even for Chris, existing in his own private Idaho with The Gourmand, there are few performance moments to care about or even note.

In “Eat Me,” carnal appetites are briefly explored — with blunt and rather unsavory language having to do with taste — separately by the two couples in an overlapping scene.

And we do hear a lot about the cats, including a now dead (but is he really?) third cat named Milo, as well as a baffling recounting of Cindy’s self-believed, hallucinatory shape shift from human to armadillo and back and forth.

In fact, the only notable acting turn in “Eat Me,” is buoyantly and raspingly landed by veteran regional theater actor/SCR alum Byrd in her riveting turns as eccentric Cindy.

Moldering away in a ratty armchair or heading off to feed her felines, Cindy is the sole confidant to Chris’ obsessions and entirely on his wavelength.

Byrd is the rarity in this staging: you want front and center as much of her as you can get, a fidgety obsessive in her own right. She and director Sullivan have contrived to portray this character as somewhere between oracle and lifelong flibbertigibbet who is also reflexively blunt.

After spewing out her personal bonkers monologue about dancing, having some sex of her own back in the day and transitioning in her mind’s eye into an armadillo, Cindy says to Chris, “Well, you asked to hear a crazy thing. So I’m telling you.”

Overall, consuming “Eat Me” is not nourishing as a crazy-kinda thing. And it sure beats this audience member as to what Monahon and SCR are telling me.

‘Eat Me’

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4 possible)

Where: Argyros Stage, South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa

When: Through May 3. 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $36-139.

Information: 714-708-5555; scr.org

Review: ‘Eat Me’ doesn’t quite satisfy at South Coast Repertory Orange County Register

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Review: ‘Eat Me’ doesn’t quite satisfy at South Coast Repertory

‘Eat Me’

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