When Abby Schachner was 14 she stopped eating. She and a boy at school had fallen in love, and when it didn’t work out she withdrew.
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After she got out of the hospital, Schachner became bulimic. “That was much worse, because I’m a pretty guilty person anyway, and when I’d see myself doing that to myself, and I’d see the vomit dripping down the heart wallpaper next to the toilet seat, it just–” she stops suddenly, twisting off a piece of the Rice Krispies treat she cradles in her lap. “It was hard to get close to people.”
Ultimately, Schachner says, her love of performing saved her life. She studied theater at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she began writing plays and sketches. Her first full-length show, The Body Piece, was a collection of dark comedy skits about eating disorders. The show struck a chord in her audience. She says women “would come up to me after the show crying and say, ‘I vomit in the shower.’ Of course, that night I’d do that too.”
In the hour-long show Schachner performs with two plucked and prepared roasting hens. Over the course of the work she talks to them like friends, argues with them like family, seduces one with nice talk and soft caresses, and finally, in one of the show’s most surrealistic and hilarious images, wears them on her hands like gloves while she shadowboxes with her inner demons.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Abby Schachner photo by Jim Alexander Newberry.
