Meet the Playwright Taking the Complexity of Eating Disorder Recovery to the Stage
“If you had asked me when I graduated, I would have said I am going to be an actor, always an actor,” Domenica Feraud said. Only a few years out of college, Feraud has made good on her promise—and then some: She is celebrating the extended run of her first play, which she stars in and wrote. Rinse, Repeat is an off-Broadway production that is currently staged at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
The plot follows Rachel (Feraud), a Yale undergraduate who has spent her past semester recovering from severe anorexia at Renley, an inpatient treatment center near her family home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her months of progress have earned her a trial weekend at home with her family to determine whether she’s ready to leave Renley for good. What unfolds over the 90-minute production is an intense, emotional survey of the pressures that have impacted Rachel’s strained relationship with food, her family, and herself.
Rachel grapples with the fear of disappointing her mother, Joan (Florencia Lozano). An Ecuadorian immigrant who could barely make ends meet when she arrived in the States, Joan worked her way up the corporate ladder to out-earn Rachel’s trust-funded father, Peter (Michael Hayden). For all of Peter’s dutiful attention to Rachel’s recovery-focused meal plan sent from Renley, he never comments on Joan’s consistent rejection of meals for a cup of coffee instead—a dynamic that is not lost on Rachel. Though each member of Rachel’s family loves her, the audience sees they repeatedly fail to support her.
“It used to be very autobiographical,” says Feraud of the play’s roots in her own life. “Then I decided to switch gears, because while my experience was interesting to me, it was not the most dramatically potent.” So began the early makings of the production that is currently being run. “I noticed there are no plays about eating disorders,” Feraud continues. “Is it that they’re not being written? Or is it that we just don’t want to do them because it’s really complicated to talk about?”
The dramatic plot compels viewers to discuss how Feraud has distilled such a complicated topic into a 90-minute production. To encourage conversation, a key element of the production is the “talkbacks” that follow one performance per week. Organizations such as NEDA, the National Eating Disorders Association, lead discussions and answer audience questions on topics like how to help loved ones who may be struggling with disordered eating. “To do this play right, you have to show these moments that are difficult to audiences that don’t get it. That’s what this play is doing. It’s communicating the experience for those who do think it’s a matter of ‘just eating.’”
While the New York City run of Rinse, Repeat concludes on August 24, Feraud’s just getting started. “People often say, ‘Oh, your first play, you know, move on and write another; you show a lot of potential,’” she said. “If there was a potential to do this play in L.A., I would happily do it. I think there’s a big audience for this play out there.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
