Ellie wants to swim in college, Katie wants a healthy baby, and Susan wants her husband to be alive.
TICKET LINK: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/belly
BELLY explores three generations of women battling different forms of control. Do you think we’ve genuinely changed the conversation around women’s bodies, or have we simply found more sophisticated ways to police them?
Such a good question. We’re seeing a really strange regression in how we speak about bodies, women’s in particular (as usual). This can likely be attributed to the extraordinary popularity of GLP-1s, especially among celebrities, politicians, and other highly influential people. I think we’re also seeing an increase in the use of injectables and body modification surgeries, and more transparency about their necessity to maintain a perceived sense of perfection – especially in circles of high influence (aka folks who have enough money to sustain pricey bodily adjustments and still have needs met). Younger and younger people have unfettered access to these images and older and older people maintain that the only way to be loved is to adhere to the social expectations in order to stay safe.
In short, I think the surveillance of bodies is absolutely the culprit of this regression, and our cultural obsession with smallness/controllability is currently winning out over any genuine conversation change.
The play tackles disordered eating, wellness culture and fatphobia with dark humour. Was there a moment in the writing process where a joke felt almost too uncomfortable to keep—and therefore had to stay?
There’s a moment where Katie, the 33-year old mother to be, is so steeped in the wellness rhetoric about how if there is anything wrong with her baby it will be because of something she ate, drank, put on her body, etc. and confesses to her unborn baby after trying to eat sauerkraut and throwing it back up, “If I told the doctor that I’m grieving right now too… I feel like she’d just coat hanger you right outta there.” And it’s stayed so far!! There’s something so visceral about the idea that a doctor might recommend an abortion simply because of a failure to eat sauerkraut coupled with grief… and, it is doubly funny to me because in the US at least, a lot of wellness culture is tied up in “Christian family values” and getting rid of the baby, no matter how badly a mom has “fucked it up” is simply not an option.
You’re performing three women at very different stages of life. Which of them surprised you most, and which one was hardest to leave behind at the end of rehearsals?
I have absolutely fallen in love with Susan, a 75-year old mom of two who has half a grapefruit and a cup of cottage cheese every morning. I was the most afraid of playing her because she is the furthest from my own lived experience, but she’s continued to surprise me with her sense of humor, willingness to be “unlikable,” and capacity for love and change.
Appetite runs through the play in many forms—not just for food, but for love, success, certainty and even grief. Which appetite do you think is the most dangerous?
For me, the appetite for certainty tends to be the most dangerous thing, and that’s borne out in these three characters too. I think our desire to know often clouds our desire to learn, and our desire to predict the outcome robs us of being surprised in any direction. This plays out in the sort of classic psychological way of repeating patterns even though their outcomes are negative (dating jerks, procrastination leading to day-of-stress, in my case… getting weird about food). Negative but predictable outcomes are nicer to our noggins in some ways! I also think often about the driving school principle “Where your eyes go, the car goes” and it’s in some ways true here too. The more we try to predict the outcome, the more predictable the outcome becomes. And this keeps a lot of us stuck in unproductive and painful loops we don’t even realize we’re in.
The body is described as both an inheritance and a battleground. If the women in BELLY could pass one thing on to the next generation—and refuse to pass on one thing—what would those be?
If Katie, Susan, and Ellie all sat down together to determine what should stay and what should go, I think they’d get rid of the harrowing experience around being in bodies of water. They’d remove all of the swimsuit shame, comparison, body talk, and objectification of being a girl in a bathing suit to simply enjoy the water.
If they could pass one thing on, it would be an understanding that perfection is a pointless endeavour, and people are not things to be fixed or solved.