Review: FEAST at Shrewd Productions @ Hyde Park Theatre

You don’t merely watch FEAST—you’re seized by the collar, handed a heaping plate of hard truths, and dared to swallow. No silverware. No second chances.

In this ferociously intelligent one-woman storm, Grendel’s mother—Agatha, though she was never named in the original poem—throws a final, furious dinner party at the end of the world. She’s older now. Wiser. Wearing the face of a woman who’s survived too much to offer comfort. Her guest list? Humanity itself. Her offering? A brutal autopsy of how we lost the future—and why we keep walking backward into the fire.

Shrewd Productions offers two options: dinner and a show, or just the show. I chose to skip dinner, but I was still served a feast that satisfied my hunger for artistic genius.

What begins as a blood call for vengeance—her son butchered by a strongman drunk on his own power—unfurls into something more profound, colder, and more devastating. A mother calling for justice.

As Agatha tells us her story, she stitches past and present into a single, unraveling tapestry, exposing ancient betrayals mirrored in modern atrocities. With aching clarity, she sees the billionaires gorging on a dying planet, the unmistakable actions of little-wanna-be kings, and a humanity so obsessed with its own reflection—chasing followers, chasing fame—that it forgets the community, forgets the Earth, forgets everything that could save it. We have not changed, she shows us—we have only grown more efficient at repeating our ruin.

Agatha transforms as she tells us her tale. She sheds the monstrous skin others forced upon her. She understands us, even as she condemns us. She becomes something achingly, terribly human.

FEAST doesn’t offer absolution. It presses your face against the mirror and demands: What did you feed? What did you let grow?

Megan Gogerty’s script is a symphony of wreckage: myth colliding with razor-edged political rage and bitter shards of pop culture. One moment you’re lost in the smoke of ancient battlefields; the next, you’re gasping under the toxic air of modern authoritarianism, rising tides, and obscene, gilded greed. The line between legend and headline blurs, until you no longer know whether you're standing in the past or the present collapsing around you.

Katherine Catmull—seven-time B. Iden Payne Best Actress winner—doesn’t just perform. She inhabits. She is wild, wounded, and funny—and when she locks eyes with you, it scorches. She breaks the fourth wall with a tenderness so sharp it cuts. You don’t watch her. You witness her.

Shannon Grounds and Melissa McKnight conjured the whimsical but raw set: a dinner party, an ancient hall, a funeral feast for a dying world. The intimacy is suffocating. You are not hidden. You are seen.

FEAST doesn’t want applause. It demands your reckoning. It refuses despair even as it drags you through the ashes. Redemption, it whispers, is possible—but only if we dare to look the monsters in the eye, especially the ones who wear our own faces.

One woman. One hour. No escape.

FEAST is not a monster’s tale.
It's a mother’s confession.
It's a survivor’s prayer.
It's an introspective look at our humanity.

FEAST is one of those shows that keeps you wondering even after the lights go out. I invite you to see for yourself. 

Duration: 60 minutes, no intermission.

FEAST

Written by Megan Gogert

Directed by Melissa McKnight

Now playing through May 17th, 2025

Thursdays through Saturdays

Dinner served at 7PM, Show starts at 8 PM
 

Shrewd Productions 

at Hyde Park Theatre 

511 W. 43rd Street