Plate
By Carol Burbank
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But these personal holocausts, unlike the mass murders of World War II, grow from an internalized enemy. To isolate and exorcise that inner, culturally created mirror of self-hatred, women with eating disorders must embrace the very wilderness of rage and disorder they rejected with their bodies, a dynamic that makes the performance of an anorexic’s narrative very tricky. Simultaneously expressing control and the rejection of control, it must embody a time when the storyteller literally attempted to disembody herself. Add to this challenge the ordinary tasks of performance and you’ll see why anorexia is featured more commonly on talk shows than on theater boards.
The combination of a late-night improv audience and Schachner’s Second City-trained presentation made Plate seem abrupt and chummy even as it explored the surreal nature of eating disorders. The evening ends with Schachner’s victory over her cake paramour, but it seems more like just the final skit in a series than the capping moment of health. Perhaps with more time her performance will come together as a single, polished journey. But even with Schachner’s jumpy pacing and one-note performance style, Plate is one of those direct, sometimes goofy performances that succeed because of their straightforward naivete. Its greatest strength is that Schachner is too irreverent to be maudlin. With more years, and continued chutzpah, she’ll find a complicated and fascinating wilderness to instruct our more domesticated storytellers.
