Philly Fringe 2024: Interrobang Productions presents Katie Hileman’s I Will Eat You Alive

The show, written and directed by Katie Hileman (who welcomed the audience at the opening performance on September 21), finds three fat women (Vicky Graham, Betse Lyons, and Meghan Taylor) around a table set for dinner. There are seats for a few audience members, too, who can choose to join the cast onstage for the duration. In five “courses” the show mixes monologue, movement, storytelling, and projections to explore our world’s often-devastating treatment of fat people.

“Am I bad?”

The show opens with Graham offering the first course: forks dipped in chocolate powder alongside her ecstatic promise to lose weight. She has finally realized “what a problem I was” to everyone else in a world where her body doesn’t fit in restaurant booths or in jeans you can buy at the store.

“What a burden it must have been to watch me exist,” she grieves to her guests—sharply satirizing the anti-fat peanut gallery while still revealing the hurt they cause. We progress to the second course, which includes heartrending childhood narratives like being served a different dinner from the rest of the family, or learning, at age 11, that the most important thing in life is to look good for men.

“Am I bad?” the women pray. “Please make me normal. Please make me good. Please make me like everyone else.”

In a darkly funny turn, Taylor embodies a diet-peddling religious zealot, wielding a copy of C.S. Lovett’s Help Lord, the Devil Wants Me Fat! and moving on to Jenny Craig: “Do you hate yourself? It’s important to start early.” Elsewhere, Lyons stands out for her embodiment of a deep and vulnerable sadness.

I won’t reveal the full menu here, but the show tackles the “calories in, calories out” cult of exercise and eating disorders head on. Hileman’s script incisively reflects on the phenomenon of Ozempic as a kind of punishment meted out through the pain of injections. And yes, a sweet catharsis is coming.

Pro-fat didactic

The show will feel validating to fat folks, and (I hope) enlightening to allies who have not experienced fat hate. Among other truths, I was glad to see the show highlight the little-known fact that most oral emergency contraceptives are less effective in anyone over 165 pounds. But despite its heartfelt vignettes, the show is primarily didactic, educating us on the experience of fat women in real life and online. And its exhilarating, sensual finish celebrates self-love without saying much about structural anti-fatness, which no amount of individual body positivity can overcome.

Kudos to this Fringe crew

Projections by Andrés Poch incorporate spot-on imagery and confront us with the real-life words of anti-fat trolls. White dresses (costumes designed by Taylor) nod to the puritanical undertones of diet culture. Unfortunately, the Icebox Project Space Gallery, which hosts many Cannonball performances this year, has terrible acoustics—it’s hard to hear any dialogue not directed right to the audience. But kudos to the production team: a previous show in the space ran long, and the artists couldn’t load theirs in until about 10 minutes before their 2pm curtain. Somehow, we were in our seats with the lights going down by 2:09.

Hungry for more?

A QR code in the playbill directs ticket-buyers to a host of resources I heartily endorse, including books, podcasts, and films from activists, writers, and scholars like Aubrey Gordon, Sabrina Strings, Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Roxane Gay, and many more. I’ll add Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, the latest book by feminist philosopher Kate Manne.

Shows like I Will Eat You Alive leave me hungry for the next stage of body liberation: mainstream directors and producers hiring fat artists, respecting and representing their bodies alongside everyone else’s.

Know before you go: this show contains partial nudity, and explicit references to eating disorders, sexual assault, and real-life hatred of fat people.