Review: Feast by Shrewd Productions
by Michael Meigs

Feast offers a shrewd re-interpretation of the classic bourgeois entertainment of "dinner and a show." Before Katherine Catmull's intense one-woman performance of Megan Gogerty's brainy, scary script based on the ancient saga of Beowulf, you can elect to start with a leisurely meal of comfort food.

 

Dinner and a show. But this isn't a night on the town in NYC or Chicago, folks, it's Austin theatre. 

 

Sign up for the pre-performance dinner if you can. It's only $20 more per person, with seating at two six-person tables, a bargain available from 6:45 before the 8 p.m. performance. Baked chicken, green beans, potatoes, a Caesar-ish salad, dinner rolls, and a bottles of acceptable red and white wine or each table. Attentive service: director Melissa McKnight seats you and serves you with assistance from actor/performer/box office guy Trey Deason, who's there to help, not to perform. And unless you reserve all six seats, you're going to dine and converse with unexpected table companions. I found myself breaking bread with a therapist, a writer, a professor from UT and another from the University of Delaware. And don't worry about sweets. You'll get fed a small confection for dessert early in the performance. No tips requested.

 

Catmull as your nameless hostess doesn't appear. Around 7:15 a crew member reads a message apologizing for her delay. Not until 8 p.m., after non-dining guests have filtered into the Hyde Park Theatre, do the lights change. The woman in the dark glittery dress appears.

 

Your journey deep into conflict, emotion, and primal instinct begins.

 

You don't have to know the story of Grendel, who terrorized the kingdom for twelve years, or that of Beowulf, the saga's principal character who came from far away to fight and slay Grendel. Catmull is the blazing spirit of Grendel's mother, whom Beowulf also fought and murdered. Such violence has long been sung, and only by chance have written examples been handed down to us. The single manuscript of Beowulf, recorded in Old English, was written around 1000 A.D. Its blood-red roots extend back at least another four centuries, to the oral dragon-slayer sagas of Scandinavia and Germany. Those were violent tales of men's exploits. Playwright Gogerty evokes equally fearless women in the person of the unnamed woman the manuscript refers to only as Grendel's dam (mother) or the swamp woman.

 

There is extensive debate among scholars—mostly male—about the unknown Old English phrase used in the manuscript to describe Grendel's mother. Many scholars and translators call her a monster, a hag, or expressions poetical but even more pejorative. Others point out that she's described with the same words as Beowulf himself. She should be a female warrior or a Lady warrior. 

 

And that's how Gogerty, McKnight, and above all the astonishing Katherine Catmull portray her. Your hostess, whether you dined or not, is a pure spirit.  She gathered clay and resurrected herself in human form. Catmull retells the story of Grendel in focused, frantic intensity. Beowulf, who came from afar to test his strength and cunning, was the monster. She took blood revenge by snatching and murdering one of Beowulf's camp followers. Blood for blood. Her reprisal should have ended the quarrel, but Beowulf tracked her down and killed her in her cave beneath a lake.

 

Gogerty's text is vivid and uncomplicated, and yet poetic. Catmull's performance is gripping, articulate, rapid, yet nuanced. She moves about the dining tables, addressing all those present. Her energy hypnotizes. She paces, explores side thoughts, shifts focus unexpectedly, modulates both mood and delivery. She comes face to face with audience members, reaches out, touches some of them. Her ferocity is modulated by painful sincerity. Above all, she builds trust. There is no fourth wall here; from the time you began your dinner or took your seat in the grotto that is this version of the Hyde Park Theatre, you are seen and accepted by this articulate, greater-than-human character. Gogerty's intricate thought labyrinths are lit by Catmull's vulnerabililty and quicksilver changes of focus. Amy Lewis's lighting design is extreme, illustrative and very effective, grabbing our attention and emphasizing those perilous shifts of focus.

 

Feast as produced by Shannon Grounds's  Shrewd Productions is theatre art of the highest quality. Deeply rooted in epic sagas, it engages human frailty and the dark of existence. Take it either way: accept it as a the re-framing of the central story of a violent epic or embrace it as an effort to grapple with the deepest questions of human existence. Grendel's mother reminds us that she could have poisoned us but she did not. Instead, she suddenly remembers her name: Agathe. A subtle, unemphasized touch, that: it's a Latinized version of a Greek word meaning "a good/honorable woman."

 

Catmull's performance ends with not one but two codas that further rouse our consciences and raise the eternal question What is to be done? Through this good woman's mouth, playwright Gogerty warns that mob vengeance is self-defeating; Catmull as the spirit of Grendel's dam laments the futility of re-creating herself as a figure of perishable, defeatable clay.

 

We, the watchers, are  dazed and full of questions. This piece and performance need to be seen again and again if one is to get beyond the storytelling into the heart of the matter. The agonized Agathe is eternal and eternally focused on justice and doing right.

 

And yes, this ferocious spirit gave me and others pieces of her heart. Both ritually and metaphorically. Quivering, dark red slices.

 

They  were delicious. 

 

EXTRAS

Program leaflet with QR link to Shrewd Productions website

 

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Feast
by Megan Gogerty
Shrewd Productions

April 25th - May 17th, 2025

Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 pm.

For those with Dinner Guest Tickets, please arrive by 6:45pm. 

 Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd Street, Austin, Texas 78751

TICKETS: www.shrewdproductions.org

 

[image via www.MeganGogerty.com]