Disordered is a sweet comedy about three women with eating disorders.
Disordered isn’t really a musical about eating disorders. If it were, it would be over at the end of the first scene. It is about the layers and layers of secrets, both personal and family, that underlie the disordered eating. Self-loathing isn’t created in a vacuum.
Disordered started its journey in 1999 as a one-act straight comedy called Barf.
What It’s About
Disordered is the story of three young women who met in college (barfing in the basement of their dorm). They have now graduated and have decided to move in together.
All three women have bulimia nervosa (binging and purging), but each has her own methods of purging food and additional components of eating disorders, a phenomenon referred to by the medical community as OSFED, or other specified feeding or eating disorder. Their conditions are as varied and specific to them as are their secrets.
Dolores is a binge eater from a Native American Catholic family in New Mexico; Izzie is a vegan anorexic animal rights activist; Mindy is hopelessly addicted to men.
The story takes place in the apartment the three women share, just after they’ve moved in together. Despite having almost nothing in common, which causes friction, they have two, very important things in common: a giant secret and an unspoken pact never to speak of it.
Disordered, at its heart, is about the price they pay for not addressing their secrets. Eventually that failure catches up with each of them.
Structurally, the musical is a combination of linear plot—their attempts to lead normal-seeming lives while desperate inside—and direct audience address. Although they openly reveal their eating behaviors to the audience at the top of the show, they hid them from one another. And the audience sees the deeper secrets in a progression, as the women themselves discover them, or realize their importance.