Playwright has felt the pain of anorexia
Playwright Kit Brennan says the inspiration for her play about anorexia, Hunger Striking — which Urban Curvz Theatre presents at Pumphouse, beginning tonight — came soon after she began teaching playwriting and related topics at Concordia University upon moving to Montreal 17 years ago.
“The subject came up in classes,” recalls Brennan, who experienced anorexia as a teenager growing up in Kingston and decided to talk about it with her students.
“I remember one student asking me, ‘So how did you recover?’ And it was interesting, because I couldn’t actually remember that part of it — I hadn’t really, at that point, put together the ‘Well, how did I get over it?’ ”
Around the same time, Brennan met a parent whose daughter was dealing with the eating disorder, characterized by excessive food restriction, irrational fear of gaining weight, and a distorted body self-perception.
“She made a remark to me (to the effect) that it (anorexia) was ‘all about vanity,’ and I thought, ‘Whoa! In my experience, it wasn’t.’ “So I wanted to write about it.” Brennan began working with a small group of students who had experienced self-starvation either themselves or in a family member or friend.
“When I got into the voice of one of them experiencing almost hallucinatory memories and thoughts and people appearing to her, I thought, ‘No, that’s actually the reality of it that I want to portray.’ ”
Once into the writing of the play, the semi-autobiographical drama Hunger Striking, Brennan realized that in her own bout with anorexia, it hadn’t simply been a matter of internalizing the slippery notion that “thinness will bring you happiness.”
Rather, “it was about the pressures from the outside that caused the change in the inside,” Brennan says.
The making of the play was full of such insights, she recalls.
“In wanting to take the audience right inside the experience of that struggle or battle to come out on the other side, it was like writing a ‘hero journey’ in a way.
“It laid a few demons to rest for me.”
And gave rise to a few thoughts on Brennan’s perceptions of anorexia — not to mention, her perspectives on it — on the part of both Urban Curvz artistic director Vanessa Sabourin, who directs the show, and her two actors, Jamie Konchak and Anita Miotti.
Sabourin points out that eating disorders afflict men as well as women, from the level of gym workouts and specific food avoidances, where it’s “the same pattern of thinking (as anorexia), just a different desired effect on the physical being,” all the way to the uncontrollable extremes of the disease itself that wreak havoc on the body. Uncontrollable? Sharing an addictive nature with diseases such as alcoholism, anorexia — at least as portrayed in Brennan’s script and from what she’s gathered from what’s out there, the director says — is all about “trying to control something that feels external to your ability to control.”
“The more control you can have over a particular aspect of your life, the more empowered you feel,” Sabourin says.
“But what ends up happening (with anorexia) is a terrible cycle that actually weakens you — and then just keeps feeding in on itself . . . which makes it deadly.”
Konchak says, of anorexia and the play containing it: “It’s about that control. It’s about finding a place to belong in this crazy mad world and feel strong and firm in who you are, not necessarily about what you look like.” Is anorexia an addiction? Often in rehearsal, the three women have pondered the issue, according to Miotti.
“The fragmented mind, the pat- terns, and the cyclical nature of the disease all feel like descriptions of addiction that I’ve heard, so I don’t think addiction and anorexia are too far apart,” Miotti says.
“In fact, this play in particular looks much more at the fragmented, cyclical pattern of thought that brings about a need for some sort of control.”
Says playwright Brennan: “When you, for whatever reason, decide not to eat, it becomes a high in itself.
“A bit addictive, I guess.”