By Alycia Patton
Contributing Writer
After 18 years in middle school, Katie made the transition to college last week, with the high hopes and enthusiasm of a typical first-year student.
A play originally written about a 13-year old girl, the collegiate version of "What's Eating Katie?" debuted last week, as Emory hosted the first-ever performance of the new script in celebration of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Last Monday and Tuesday, a dozen Emory students took to the stage in Harland Cinema and gave the audience an inside look at eating disorders from the perspective of a young woman navigating her first few months of college.
The musical, first written as a play in 1996, addresses eating disorders and body image, and how these issues are influenced by the media and popular culture. The story begins with our protagonist Katie, played by College junior Julia Weeks, getting ready for her first day of college, and follows her throughout her first semester. Katie's diet, motivated by a desire to fit in and be liked, is pushed to extremes by "ED," a physical embodiment of her developing eating disorder (played by College freshman Aaron Freedman).
Katie starts out skipping meals, replacing them with coffee and workouts, but eventually progresses to binging and then throwing up after eating. In between these kinds of scenes, various supporting actors had the audience laughing out loud with over-the-top "commercials" for products such as diet snacks or the "Buttcrusher" work-out program.
This exaggerated comedic style dominated most of the performance, especially the portrayal of the supporting female characters. Katie's sorority friends and the dieting actresses whom Katie watches on TV come across as caricatures rather than characters. This method was good for a cheap laugh or two, but makes the women the butt of the joke instead of portraying them as real people with the same relatable desire for skinniness that Katie herself struggles with. Between the cartoonish characters, the silly commercials and the campier of the musical numbers, it's not hard to see the middle-school origins of "What's Eating Katie?" The context is clearly collegiate, complete with alcoholic revelry and the horrors of organic chemistry, but the mood still ventures into more juvenile, after-school-special territory, especially during the first half of the musical.
However, the levity of the script was tempered by the plentiful talent of the cast. The actors performed the catchy musical numbers with vibrant energy and well-coordinated, graceful movements. The dynamic between Weeks' Katie and Freedman's handsome, smooth-talking "ED" was especially entertaining. They brought to life the complex motivations behind an eating disorder in a way that felt natural and relatable even to those who have never experienced one.
But the show had much more to offer than its leads. Among the superb supporting cast, College junior Natalia Via especially stood out, playing both the athletic trainer and the spokesperson for "Buttcrusher" workouts.
These strong performances and the overall smooth coordination were especially impressive given that, as the cast later explained, they only had one week of working together with director Ken Hornbeck to prepare for the show.
The venue of Harland Cinema also posed some difficulties for the cast and director. With its limited space and technical equipment, Harland Cinema is more suited for lectures than theater productions. But the team rose to the challenge and mostly overcame its limited resources by relying on strategically placed furniture and well-chosen costumes to supplement its substantial allotment of talent.
As the show progressed, the tone shifted from lighthearted to more serious, culminating in the final two numbers, in which Katie is confronted by concerned loved ones and then finally gets professional help for her disorder.
The scene during which Katie meets with a therapist, excellently portrayed by Alicia Wilson, is particularly powerful. Even people who have never struggled with mental health issues could surely relate to Katie's grief and desperation, as she opens up to her therapist and confronts ED with tears in her eyes.
After the performance, Weeks recounted how two women who had suffered from eating disorders came to speak to the cast during their week of rehearsals, stating that this experience "forced me to examine my own relationship with food."
After each show, audience members were invited to stay for a question-and-answer session with the cast, playwright Dina Zeckhausen, director Ken Hornbeck and Laura Minch, a psychologist from the Renfrew Center.
The Renfrew Center, an Atlanta residential treatment facility for women with eating disorders, helped sponsor the production, which was presented by the Emory chapter of the mental health promotion group Active Minds.
The group answered some questions from the audience about the process of casting and producing the musical, but the session was dominated by discussion of the larger issues that served as the driving force behind the show's creation.
Zeckhausen described the concept of "social contagion" as a form of implicit peer pressure that she sees as a driving force behind the development of eating disorders, and explained how she aspired to utilize it in a more positive way.
Overall, "What's Eating Katie?" succeeded as an entertaining way to portray some of the issues that lead to eating disorders and the difficulties people face in overcoming them, sparking a conversation about how to address them.
Without such a gifted cast and crew, the show would have surely struggled to overcome the awkward, heavy-handed comedy that betrays its more juvenile origins. But in their capable hands, Zeckhausen's worthwhile message was delivered with humor, empathy and creativity.
– By Alicia Patton
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