‘Feeding the Cat, Incorrectly, Several Times Over’ @ Echo Theatre

Photos by Zack Huggins

—Martha Heimberg

Talk about a bloody intriguing love story.

Shyama Nithiananda’s Feeding the Cat, Incorrectly, Several Times Over is one of two winners of Echo Theatre’s 2023 Texas Shout Out New Play Contest for Women + Playwrights Contest. Early on in the two-hour show, we’re advised to regard the people and events we meet as “remarkably unremarkable,” particularly when viewed “a hundred years from now,” in the words of a character addressing the audience. It’s an interesting prologue to the proceedings.

Directed with detail and taut pacing by Katie Ibrahim in Echo’s intimate performance space at the Bath House Cultural Center, the play centers on a love triangle in which all three characters are forced to make serious decisions with possibly dangerous outcomes—and all of them regularly question if they’re doing (or have done) the right thing. Gen Z doesn’t have the market cornered on anxiety, but these young professionals show a lot of classic symptoms. Breaking up and breaking beer bottles is the least of it.

Jen (a teasing, wryly smiling Celeste Perez) acts as the narrator, and plays a female medical student intent on sharing a pad with a somewhat bewildered high school teacher currently living with another female med student. Jo (a tense, hurried Caitlin Chapa) and teacher Peter (a needy, lost-looking Mac Welch) split the rent and live “together”—when they’re not rushing off to work or coming back. They also buy cat food, providing a running bit about who’s fed the cat from the metal bowl in the kitchen. Busy Jo, in a rare domestic moment, efficiently removes a sliver of broken glass from howling Peter’s bare foot, and tenderly wraps the small cut, while her trembling guy smiles and calms down.

Then a mysterious woman with a real bleeding wound on her forehead shows up in the ER at the hospital where Jo is an intern. (In Jose Torres’s spare, clever set design, the apartment kitchen becomes an ER station.) The woman, who we later learn is Jen, refuses to fill out any paperwork, and says she won’t stay for treatment if Jo forces her to do so. Jo clearly sympathizes, but when she turns her back the woman jumps off the examining table, rifles quickly and knowingly through the medicine drawers, and exits in the other direction.

Jo gets chewed out by her professor (a stern Lindsay Hayward) for “losing a patient,” and warned about the need to complete the required paperwork. (A cloud of such paperwork, homework, class-drop forms and other printed papers float magically from the ceiling at one point, in a funny directorial touch, particularly with our tax due-date on the horizon.)  Jo’s also told to be less cold, to present a more trusting persona to injured people.  Perplexed and exhausted, Jo arrives home stewing.

Meanwhile, back in the tiny office tucked away at the opposite side of the stage, weary Peter tries to explain to high school student Marcus (a helplessly defiant Danny Lovelle; his character skips everybody’s class but Peter’s) that he won’t graduate if he doesn’t show up. Perez’s Jen, her wound from the ER incident still visible, is with the boy and appears to be his mother. She looks on ceremoniously as Peter lectures Marcus. When they leave the office, Jen turns back and gives the flustered teacher the twice-over and a bold, come-hither smile. Peter gets home a bit bouncier, and maybe weighing options?

The plot centers on the triangle that inevitably develops when push comes to push-back. There’s a window involved. Still, the most compelling aspect of the play is watching two attractive, ambitious women (ironically, both are medical school students aiming to be healers) battle it out—for what?

Part of the play’s allure is the gradual revelation of two very different styles of the combatants, as they face career and love obstacles. “The style of the man is the man,” Wallace Stevens wrote. I expect that observation is meant for all genders. Speaking of style, costume designer Jasmine Woods’ contemporary costumes include more than blue scrubs.

Let’s say you try to play by the rules, and those rules are suddenly at cross purposes with another person’s very survival. What then? Who does the right thing? Can we step back and simply view the final scenes as “remarkably unremarkable”?

You’ll need to see the dramatic twists and turns of Feeding the Cat for yourself—and just try finding that well-fed feline anywhere in the theater.

WHEN: February 9-23, 2024
WHERE: Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Dr., Dallas
WEB: echotheatre.org