April Woodall bounces, giggles, confides freely and glides merrily through “Born Fat” as if she’s among family. In a sense, she is. In this show, now at Seven Angels Theatre Jan. 29 through 31, Woodall is Waterbury home girl Elizabeth Petruccione, who overcame decades of parental abuse and social difficulties regarding her eating habits, and is now using her experiences to help others.
Her self-help-manual-cum-memoir, “You Were Born Fat,” has become the basis of a one-woman show scripted by Hartford-based playwright Jacques Lamarre. Petruccione has been in the audience for some performances, and her book is available for sale in the lobby. Lamarre recalls seeing the show recently with “people from her weight loss classes all around me.”
The framework for “Born Fat” is a meeting of “Losing Weight With Elizabeth” held at “Seven Angels Church.” The house lights are up for much of the performance, which takes the tone of a motivational speech but ultimately only delivers health and diet tips as an afterthought, at the very end of the evening. The subject of the play is not Petruccione’s weight-loss plan but Petruccione herself. We hear about how both her parents berated her for being overweight, how a succession of husbands cheated on her and how her best friends turned on her. She ultimately lost 93 pounds — not so she could be “skinny,” as so many fad diets were cajoling her, but so she could be “healthy.” Petruccione developed her own weight-loss method, with the catchphrase “Don’t diet — Edit!” and the concept of “banking” calories.
“You Were Born Fat” takes its title from one of the many cutting remarks Petruccione attributes to her domineering mother. The book wants to serve many potential readerships simultaneously — it spins tales of the author’s life, offers weight loss tips and recipes and even serves as a weight-loss journal with weight-tracking charts.
The stage version, with its shortened title “Born Fat,” takes the “Don’t diet — Edit!” mantra to heart by revising and streamlining Petruccione’s life story and philosophy into a clear, cohesive narrative. Woodall gives the monologue a propulsive perkiness and incessant live energy, dancing about the stage and laughing at her own jokes. At one point, she recites several paragraphs while pretending to chew a hamburger. The set is simple — the accustomed semicircle of chairs you find at motivational group meetings, plus a screen on which various illustrative images are projected. There are very few props — the biggest one is a shipping truck lugged onstage to demonstrate the 93 pounds that Petruccione lost. Pop songs from the 1970s and ’80s provide a soundtrack.
Thanks to Woodall’s energetic performance and some crazy one-liners (a diet that requires the swallowing of a parasitic worm is described as “like having a Kardashian in your colon”), “Born Fat” has abundant upbeat humor. But playwright Lamarre warns that “there is dark material in it.” The play deals with depression, low self-esteem and times of horrific tragedy in Petruccione’s life. Structured as if it were an actual “Weight Loss With Elizabeth” presentation, “Born Fat” is the story of one woman’s triumph over health obstacles, heartbreak and adversity.
“Born Fat” isn’t Lamarre’s first food-based play. His adaptation of another book, Giulia Melucci’s “I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti,” has had productions throughout the country, including in Connecticut at Seven Angels Theater and TheaterWorks. And he’s got another one in the oven: “The Raging Skillet,” based on the “memoir with recipes” published this year by Chef Rossi, whom Lamarre describes as a “Jewish, lesbian punk rock caterer in New York.” “The Raging Skillet” is on the list of plays under consideration for TheaterWorks’ 2016-17 season.
“I love food,” Lamarre admits. “And it’s something we all have in common. ‘Born Fat’ is different because it’s about struggles with eating. The obesity epidemic is relatable. The story takes on larger dimensions. She becomes a weight-loss advocate during the course of the play.
“I’ve known Elizabeth Petruccione for 15 years. I knew her when she was 250 pounds. She would have these lavish dinner parties, which she doesn’t do anymore. We grew apart for a few years, and when I saw her again she was 50 pounds lighter. I’ve never attended one of her meetings … as you would know if you’d seen me recently,” said Lamarre.
“Parts of her book are autobiographical, but not enough to make into a play,” Lamarre recalls. So he sat down for hours with Petruccione to expand upon some of her stories. After that, Lamarre says, the writing process went rather quickly. The play was tried out at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival last summer. “April [Woodall] had connections there. She had a friend who was willing to direct. It wasn’t done in a theater — it was done at an art gallery.” The Seven Angels run marks the first full production of “Born Fat.”
“BORN FAT” is at Seven Angels Theatre, Hamilton Park Pavilion, 1 Plank Road, Waterbury, Jan. 29 through 31. Performances are Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $27.50 to $80. Information: 203-757-4676, sevenangelstheatre.org.
