Review Roundup: MEAT SUIT, OR THE SHITSHOW OF MOTHERHOOD Opens at Second Stage Theater

Read the reviews for MEAT SUIT, OR THE SHITSHOW OF MOTHERHOOD, playing now at the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center. See what the critics had to say in our roundup below!

Written and directed by Aya Ogawa, MEAT SUIT, OR THE SHITSHOW OF MOTHERHOOD stars Marina Celander, Cindy Cheung, Robyn Kerr, Maureen Sebastian, and Liz Wisan.

The new work is described as a genre-defying theatrical piece that examines the experience of motherhood through physical theater, satire, original songs, and absurdist elements. The production explores how the arrival of a child can alter a mother’s autonomy, identity, and personal desires, while addressing themes of transformation and selfhood.

The cast includes Marina Celander (Mermaid’s Howl), Cindy Cheung (Laowang, Bus Stop, The Antiquities), Robyn Kerr (The Great Society, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), Maureen Sebastian (The Best We Could, Lonely, I’m Not), and Liz Wisan (Other Desert Cities, Gloria: A Life).

Sara Holdren, Vulture: Maybe being a mom means, in part, always being behind, never quite catching up. Time becomes more soup than arrow, more palimpsest than progress. I often feel old and sore and busted and also simultaneously adolescent and clueless, a child recklessly, optimistically playing house. “I don’t know what I’m doing / I don’t know what will happen / But I know what I know,” sing the actors at the end of Meat Suit. All of them are mothers themselves — which, in this business, in this world, is its own small revolution. “I see you,” they sang, and whatever else I felt, I knew they meant it. I see them, too.

Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: Putting the word shitshow in the title of your play seems almost like a dare to the writer of an unenthusiastic review. I will resist the easy jab, though, because writer-director Aya Ogawa’s carnivalesque pageant—which explores and explodes different facets of motherhood through satirical vignettes, musical numbers and bouffon body horror—is audacious in more than its name. The show is intent on airing ugly and troubling aspects of maternity, and Ogawa delivers them cesarean style: with a few deep cuts and a lot of mess.

Roma Torre, New York Stage Review: As a mother of two, whenever I learn that a family member or friend has just given birth, I often say “Welcome to the agony and ecstasy of parenthood.” And in many cases, it’s the mom who bears the brunt of it. If you want to experience what the worst of it looks like, you can get a crash course in Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood.

Kyle Turner, New York Theatre Guide: Challenging certain creeds about motherhood has been on the minds of playwrights this season, with Liberation on Broadway, The Waterfall off Broadway at WP Theater, and now Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood off Broadway at Second Stage Theater. But while the memory play Liberation and the two-hander The Waterfall are relatively conventional in form, Meat Suit, written and directed by Aya Ogawa, is a jolting and sometimes riotously funny take on motherhood narratives.

Average Rating: 60.0%