Last year, Shrewd Productions staged FEAST to wide critical acclaim, racking up multiple theater nominations and a couple of awards for actor Katherine Catmull. The one-person play, which reimagines the story of Beowulf as warning against authoritarianism, felt timely in 2025 and director Melissa McKnight says it feels even more timely now. “It just feels even more and more relevant,” she says. “Every day… I kind of have to stop focusing so much on the news because it’s all terrible.”
“Yeah, it addresses – not specifically, but pretty directly – our current situation,” Catmull agrees. “But the character is a thousand years old. A thousandish? More? I don’t know. How old is Beowulf? I don’t know if you remember in Beowulf, he’s the big hero… he’s Danish, I think. And he slays a big monster and then he slays the monster’s mother. The monster’s name is Grendel and the mother’s name is ‘Grendel’s Mother.’ And [the character in FEAST] is Grendel’s mother. She’s just been floating around in a disintegrated way… watching all the devastation spread from what she calls ‘the fathers.’ And she pulled herself together and invited everybody to a dinner party so she can explain to them where they’re going wrong.”
“What if Grendel really wasn’t a monster, but was just someone trying to say, hey, y’all are headed down a really bad path? And here’s why,” McKnight says. “And all he got in return was people trying to fight him. And he didn’t really want to fight. He just wanted to talk and debate and say, hey, do you realize that the path that you’re taking is killing the land and the trees, and you’re really upsetting your neighbors? And then all of a sudden this guy shows up and actually succeeds where everyone else has failed for over 12 years in killing him.”
FEAST is a one-actor show, though there will be others on the stage with Catmull – audience members who buy a ‘dinner guest’ ticket will join the dinner party onstage. “It’s not scary audience participation,” Catmull promises. “I sit at the tables with them occasionally and talk to them and give them scary looks. It’s fun!”
Does Catmull find Grendel’s Mother easy to relate to? “I wouldn’t have thought so, but boy I really do,” she says. “When we did this last year, friends of mine were saying, well, I didn’t know you had all that stuff. I mean, it’s not my normal kind of role, to be honest, but it really woke up quite a lot of anger and a lot grief and a lot of confidence and a lot of humor. It’s also a very funny show. A very funny show and very surprisingly funny. It takes a lot of left turns from rage to hilarity, I think.”
“The playwright, Megan Gogerty, she writes comedic scripts and plays and she’s wonderful,” McKnight adds.
McKnight says the 2026 version of FEAST doesn’t make big changes from last year’s staging, but Catmull says that she feels a little different this time around. “I think for me, personally, it’s going to be really interesting to do it again,” she explains. “One way it’s changed for me is that I have more anger. [Grendel’s Mother] talks a lot about the difference between vengeance and justice and how that’s difficult for her to understand just because of who she is — that she’s more of a revenge-based person. I hope people take away that it’s okay to claim your fire, but make it a fire for justice instead of a fire for revenge.”