It starts, like many nightmares, with toilet trouble. In Cory Finley's horror-comedy The Feast, a world premiere at the Flea Theater, live-in couple Anna and Matt's relationship takes a turbulent turn when the head starts making noise. What follows is a briskly paced, earnestly acted and largely unflinching examination of the how we hurt and try to heal the ones we love. Also, there are Lovecraftian beings, a creepy (if tacit) Last Supper pastiche and a few cunning, none-too-cheap scares that will stay with you.
With Anna leaving for Pittsburgh, a restless Matt finds himself swimming through the pipes to a subterranean kingdom peopled -- or "creatured" -- by sewer monsters that greet him as a guest of honor. He keeps this to himself, only telling his shrink, but when Anna owns up to having cheated on him with a coworker and tries to make it right, he snaps her olive branch and begins a long descent. The sewer dwellers start appearing in his painting and this is where the real trouble starts. Much like the jealous, Old Testament God, they're not too big on the graven images and they send down a storm and a whole lot more by way of punishment. Or do they? What's real and what's imagined is a slippery issue and a big part of the piece's appeal.
Finley's crackling script is ruthlessly efficient. We don't linger too long in scenes and seeming incidentals like the mention of a wizard or the precise definition of the word "deliverables" give us pivot points in Matt and Anna's relationship when they're saved for later. Finley knows how words are weaponized and harped on. But the biggest gift of The Feast is the alchemy of Courtney Ulrich's direction, which abstracts the familiar and leaves the audience in a kind of fugue state along with Ivan Dolido's manic Matt. The trio of actors -- Marlowe Holden joins Dolido as the conflicted Anna with Donaldo Prescod in the factotum role of "Man" (actually more like six roles) -- deliver the fever dream with a lived-in energy that grounds the world enough to let the strangeness fly. The flicker of Scot Gianelli's lights, the stray paint tubes and art books strewn over Andrew Diaz's set and Travis Alexandra Boatright's dressed-down costumes -- sweats with stains and an occasionally gorgeous dress for Anna -- make up an ethos ripe for the weird, and Elliot Davoren's sound design is the strident soundtrack to our downward spiral. For the couple that wants more Ghostbusters tropes in their relationship politics, or at least a compromise between the two extremes, The Feast may make a good date night. Or maybe a really bad one. There's a reason I'm single.
