Margin Notes: Belly

Belly

Seen on: Friday, 7/24/26.

Plot and Background

In advance of its run in Edinburgh, Reilly O'Shaughnessy's one woman show Belly runs briefly at 59E59. Belly tells the interwoven narratives of Ellie, a teenager on the swim team whose coach advises her to follow a strict (starvation) diet and exercise routine in order to win a scholarship; Katie, Ellie's aunt, currently expecting her first child and worried she will somehow ruin her fetus's health by eating the wrong food or gaining too much weight; and Susan, Katie's mother and Ellie's grandmother, a grieving widow who keeps to a very strict diet and unconsciously reinforces unhealthy attitudes toward body size and dieting on her descendants. Playwright/performer O'Shaughnessy periodically breaks the fourth wall as herself throughout the narrative of these three women as they struggle with body image issues, grief, and eating disorders, to discuss her own personal experience with them herself.

Thoughts:

"Is there a food that makes you feel safe?" Reilly asks the audience and answers for herself: while in recovery for her eating disorder, Honey Nut Cheerios felt safe to eat. Even as O'Shaughnessy's play tells three specific stories -- and a bit of her own -- it also easily opens the door for the audience to contemplate their own history with body dysmorphia, fear of weight gain, fear of failure, fatphobia in the medical field and in schools, generational diet culture, and the overwhelming sensation in society that one must make oneself as small as possible in order to be considered worthy. It's all profoundly relatable. The euphoria of seeing the number on the scale go down, of feeling proud of sticking to a diet, but always chased so quickly by intrusive thoughts of being "bad" for craving or even consuming sugar, of failure when the number on the scale goes up. Throughout the seventy-minute show I could hear people crying and sniffling, not only for the grief of the characters onstage but also for their own history. While Ellie struggles with her declining health, she remembers "I used to be able to feel my edges in the pool. Like, be able to feel where I was, where I started, where I stopped ... And now? I can't feel anything."

Still, even with the heavy subject, O'Shaughnessy finds ways to lighten things, by hanging an absurd lantern on the things we're told about our health and bodies. When Katie goes for a check-up to see how her fetus is developing, "Dr. Gwen" sings a frankly hilarious song (title not indicated but in my head I called it "The Anatomy Song (It's All Your Fault)"), including gems like "Stress causes hypoxia / Hypoxia causes fear / Fear causes failure / Failure starts right here" and the even more absurd "Scoliosis is certain if you stand on your toes!" This fear of failure continues to eat at Katie in horrible ways, and when the birth goes wrong she tells herself, "No one knew why ... but I knew."

Ultimately the play takes us to a place of healing, as it must: not everyone survives an eating disorder, but Reilly has, and her characters do, and O'Shaughnessy leads with hope. Recovery is a lifelong process, and relapsing is common, but this is not a solitary journey. In an imagined conversation between Katie and her fetus, she contemplates the complexity of her deceased father, who was brave and smart, but also mean. And then she says quietly, to herself and to her child, "Maybe we can be brave and smart and mean." We are not only the worst thing that has happened to us. We are not only the worst thing we have done. These are part of us, but we are also the good things we have done.

***

Running: Recently playing at 59E59 Theatre (Hi Brow Productions) - Opened: July 22, 2026. Closed: July 25, 2026.
Category: one-woman show
Length: 1hour, 10 minutes, including intermission.

Creative Team

Playwright & Performer: Reilly O'Shaughnessy
Director: Juliet Kapanjie
Team: Claire Chrzan  (Lighting), Eric Backus (Sound), Jeremy Harris ("Tech Magician" and Stage Manager), Bethany McHugh (Resident UK Director), Katie Rosin/Kampfire PR (Publicity).