I would say I have a stomach for body horror, having cackled at the climactic scene of the 2024 film “The Substance” when the monster gushes pus all over the audience, and relished the main character of “Raw” (2016) sucking on her sister’s severed finger. So when one of the protagonists of Exquisite Corpse starts munching on a ballerina’s liposuctioned stomach fat, bite by bite, I was delighted, even if my friend and several other audience members were not. 

The staged reading took place last Friday at the Hill Theater, in partial fulfillment of the senior exercise in film for writer and director Paloma Fernandez ’26. Before the reading started, Fernandez walked onto the stage, wearing a slick black dress, the same color as the outfits of all the cast members. She informed the audience of the unconventional structure of the play — three separate vignettes with three different protagonists — and provided a short introduction of the overarching theme, “the horrors of obsession.”

What followed: a young failed artist (Salomé Stonys ’28) who bears uncanny resemblance to a mega pop star gets chased down by teenage girls at every turn; a medical photographer (Iris Santalucia ’26) at a plastic surgery clinic befriends a ballerina (Charlie Sacha ’26) she’s long obsessed over; a lonely woman (Pippa Lombana ’29) comes head-to-head with the miniature figures she made herself. This comedy-horror staged reading had the audience laugh, gag and headscratch thinking about society’s treatment of female bodies and desires. 

Because the production was a reading of a screenplay rather than a playscript, which I did not know coming in, the audience’s active imagination was key to making the experience enjoyable. Some scenes could be pictured with ease, with the comical dialogue and action lines sending the audience into fits of laughter. Some were more difficult to construct in my mind — especially in Vignette Three, when, for example, the protagonist bickers with the miniature version of herself, leading to the latter pulling out a miniature gun.

Understandably, the bombastic absurdity of the screenplay would perhaps be best expressed in the film format. In a conversation with Fernandez, I found out that she would like the miniature townspeople of Vignette Three to be made into claymation. A combination of real-life actors and claymation figures would indeed be quite a feat. However, there was plenty of amusement to be found in the humorous descriptions of the gory extremes that the project’s female characters are willing to reach, even without the visualization.

The cast did a wonderful job bringing the screenplay to life. Sacha embodied both a haughty pop star and a vapid ballerina with a shrill voice and temperamental demeanor. Santalucia pulled off a tricky balance, playing a demented young woman who schemes to feed a ballerina cake made from her own stomach fat, yet carries out the plot with endearingly clumsy awkwardness. Fernandez knew she wanted an all-female cast in alignment with the screenplay’s centering of femininity. The male characters in the screenplay, such as boorish teenage boys and a horny old man “actively overdosing on Viagra,” thus came to life in lowered voices, fratty gesticulation and hunched backs. The result is hysterical. (If the script is ever made into a film, it’s my conviction that the director should go with an all-female cast playing both male and female characters again.)

Overall, the actors’ choices animated the reading. According to Fernandez, she did not give them much direction. She said, “[The actors] would start reading a part, and they would come out with an accent that I didn’t ask them to do… I was like, ‘Wow, you guys are really taking all of these characters as your own.’”

While the absurd comedy and gore made the reading delightful to watch, it unfortunately blighted the characters’ interiority. The common thread between the three protagonists was that they were deeply lonely, the catalyst for their desperate striving for attention — this was a sentiment that Fernandez set out to establish. However, their loneliness was overshadowed by the chain of insane decisions that did not seem motivated by a consistent personal pain or desire. I laughed at the characters — women driven to the edge by the oh-so-familiar need to compete with other women, by their desire to be loved — but I’m not sure I felt deeply for them the way I wanted to.

Fernandez said she wanted the audience to leave the theater with “a healthy dose of discomfort.” While it’s certain that many of us did, I wonder if the discomfort stemmed from having been treated to a series of endlessly deranged actions, or from having been challenged on what we believe about beauty, obsession and loneliness. Maybe it was the former more than the latter. Nevertheless, I had a wonderful time and will be in line when the project gets made into one or multiple feature films. In the meantime, I’m content to witness an early iteration of an audacious project that marries gore with the gravity of femininity.