‘Eat Me’ review: Hitting a dead end in a foodie wonderland

Talene Monahon, an American playwright of Armenian descent, wrote one of the most talked about plays of 2025, “Meet the Cartozians.”

The play, which received its off-Broadway premiere from Second Stage Theater, examines Armenian American identity through the politicized lens of race classification, viewing the legal history and the contemporary ramifications side by side in an ingenious diptych comedy-drama that deserves a major production in Los Angeles.

For this reason, I was eager to catch Monahon’s latest, “Eat Me,” which is having its world premiere at South Coast Repertory, where the play was developed at last year’s Pacific Playwrights Festival. I wish I could be enthusiastic, but “Eat Me” is a relentlessly quirky work that gorges on its own dark whimsy.

A few audience members at Sunday’s matinee appeared to take issue with some of the play’s brief spasms of vulgarity. One particularly boisterous early exit sent a loud message of protest.

I found the dithering in the writing more offensive than the dirty talk. Monahon, whose impressive list of works includes “The Good John Proctor,” is free-associating a bit too indulgently on the topics of eating and pleasure. I couldn’t help thinking of another play that dealt kaleidoscopically on culinary themes, Julia Cho’s “Aubergine,” a lyrical meditation on food, cultural heritage and death that so impressed me at Berkeley Rep in 2016 I saw it again at South Coast Rep in 2019.

Monahon has prepared some promising dramatic notes, but the play’s larger vision still eludes her. The characters she has assembled have a peppery intrigue. But the scenes she’s devised for these sympathetically difficult oddballs go nowhere.

“Eat Me,” directed by Caitlin Sullivan, plays cat and mouse with its audience, not wanting to give away its secrets. But the cat is so busy chasing its tail, the mouse saunters away and curls up for a nap.

Chris (Sheldon D. Brown), a gay Black man who has been through some kind of harrowing medical experience, has changed his life since getting out of the hospital. He’s now living with Cindy (the formidable Anne Gee Byrd), a much older eccentric white woman, whose life revolves around her cats, both living and dead.

Chris, it turns out, has given up his career as an administrative lawyer for a life of fine dining and epicurean delicacies. His pregnant sister, Beatrice (Kacie Rogers), and her wife, Jen (Carolyn Ratteray), are shocked to learn that he’s not going back to the firm. They’re panicked that he’s losing the thread of his life since his body underwent some unspecified “seismic change.”

Jake Borelli, left, and Sheldon D. Brown in “Eat Me” at South Coast Repertory.

(Robert Huskey / South Coast Repertory)

Most nights, Chris likes watching TV with Cindy, who is the opposite of a foodie. Her refrigerator is full of iceberg lettuce, ranch dressing and Diet Coke. She’s more concerned with what her cats are eating than what’s on her own dinner menu.

But Chris has tentatively started dating again. He has arranged to meet Stevie (Jake Borelli), a schlubby guy who’s in a Nintendocore band, at an upscale Italian restaurant. The two men don’t have much in common, except that they’re both picking up the pieces of their fractured lives.

Monahon allows scenes to take place simultaneously, so that while Chris is on the date he is simultaneously reporting his experience to Cindy. The fluidity of the technique is refreshing, but the problem is that nothing is allowed to build. Fragments of story are fed to us, but there’s no forward thrust, just a lot of pussyfooting around.

Sheldon D. Brown and Anne Gee Byrd in South Coast Repertory’s 2026 world premiere production of “Eat Me” by Talene Monahon.

(Scott Smeltzer / South Coast Repertory)

Haunting the play is the mysterious figure of The Gourmand (Jeorge Bennett Watson). He appears sometimes as a waiter who ponderously offers Chris more time to decide what he wants to order (“the greatest gift any of us could ask for”) and sometimes as an active figure in the online Gourmet-Gourmand community who is always raving about some gastronomic ecstasy or other.

The production feels like a jumble, and the casting doesn’t help sort out the mess. The design team, responding to the work’s fluidity, enjoys keeping us in the dark before ambushing us with unasked-for surprises.

“Eat Me” is an odd but apt title. The first thing that popped into my mind was Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” and the connection goes beyond temptation and ingestion. Both Monahon and Carroll are writing about transformation of the paradigm-exploding kind.

What happened to Chris is finally explained, more or less. The change he’s undergone, from being a man driven by work to one wanting to experience his fill of sensual pleasures, partly explains his friendship with Cindy. The pairing of Chris’ vulnerability with Cindy’s crustiness evoke aspects of the intergenerational relationship in Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” though “Eat Me” lacks Hunter’s psychological acuity and sustained dramatic focus.

Cindy may be the opposite of a sybarite, but she knows something about how human beings morph over time. One day, she shares, she discovered that she had taken on the form of an armadillo. She eventually changed back but now that she’s getting closer to the end of her life, she hopes she will become food for her cats, thus transforming once again into an animal.

We’re not exactly in wonderland but we’re in surreal territory all the same in a play that spins ideas not so much to delight an audience as to free up an adventurous dramatist whose new style has emerged prematurely from its chrysalis.