Fat Theatre Project takes shape with The InterPlays
Kit Kelly, Lenci Davis in Eileen Tull's "Ava in Heat" in Fat Theatre Project’s The InterPlays. Photo by Faramade F. Oladapo.
Last weekend Fat Theatre Project opened its first fully staged production, The InterPlays, directed by Melody DeRogatis. Written by Sarah Katherine Bowden, Melody DeRogatis, Allison Fradkin, and Fat Theatre Project founder Eileen Tull, The InterPlays is a series of vignettes connected by a theme that tells the tale of looking for love, finding it, and keeping it despite the inner voices that scream you aren’t good enough or that you will end up broken.
Fat Theatre Project is barely into its first year and is charging ahead with its mission to tell stories by/for/with/about fat people with The InterPlays. Their first production set the new standard of what the ideal face of desire and love looks like. It’s everyone. It wasn’t about accepting your body, it wasn’t about forcing an agenda, it was a production of people trying to find their way in love and life and accepting the imperfections, perceived flaws, and fragility of us all. Told with humor, wit, and unabashed joy, The InterPlays was Fat Theatre Projects welcoming bow for what is to come.
Quietly raw The InterPlays is a new standard of work for portraying simple, mundane acts without the need for perfection to invoke an audience to connect and feel. The first moments of affection post-COVID, realizing your partner will never be satisfied with the temperature, and the dreaded task of making dinner, all piece together creating an hour show filled with relatable scenes causing audiences to find the levity in the lovable (sometimes loath-able) absurdity that is relationships. Fat Theatre Project gives space to the body of work that has long been told it isn’t good enough, isn’t ready, has to lose 20 pounds before it can be appreciated and desired. It is come as you are theatre.
Maybe with theatre like this, theatre that doesn’t tell us how to be and understands that out there in the world beyond that safe stage is a cacophony of rules and standards all differing, all insane, all pushing us away from our true selves and inner voices. No one told Fat Theatre Project how to be, but they found their way.
The InterPlays is on stage at the coach house at Berger Park Cultural Center until August 25. For more information and tickets, visit their Instagram or ticketing site.
