{ "title": "From Recovery to the Stage: Reilly O'Shaughnessy's BELLY", "modified_at": "2026-06-22 19:55:32", "published_at": "2026-06-22 19:55:00", "url": "https://answered-in-five.prezly.com/from-recovery-to-the-stage-reilly-oshaughnessys-belly", "short_url": "http://prez.ly/VqJd", "culture": "en", "language": "EN", "subtitle": "The actor, writer, and coach is bringing a raw, deeply human play about appetite, grief, and control to stages in New York and Edinburgh this summer.", "slug": "from-recovery-to-the-stage-reilly-oshaughnessys-belly", "body": "

Reilly O'Shaughnessy had the kind of formative theater experience that changes a life. She was six or seven years old when her mother took her to see Les Misérables; her father had bailed on their date, but her mother, a musical theater devotee, showed up anyway. “I think she's seen it like fifteen times,” Reilly remembers. That evening, she fell head over heels for Eponine and understood, with the clarity that only childhood can bring, that she wanted to perform.

From second grade onward, theater became her truth. BFA from NYU Tisch. MA in International Theatre Practice from Rose Brufeld. Nearly an MFA in Acting from DePaul. Performances, teaching gigs from Montessori preschools to Rikers Island, and coaching artists through creative blocks. The trajectory looked like devotion. But life, as it does, had other lessons in store.

In 2018, just after graduating from NYU, Reilly moved to LA to start an MFA at DePaul. But shortly after, she was diagnosed with Giant Cell Tumor of the Bone. What followed was three years of recovery: two major surgeries, crutches, a PICC line IV, intense depression, and a constant reckoning with what her body had become. “My body and mind changed over and over again during that time,” she recalls.

During those years, Reilly had to confront something else: a long-standing eating disorder that had shadowed her for years. Theater is a profession that demands a certain body; diet culture had taken root early and deep. “I spent so much time trying to make myself smaller,” she explains. Recovery meant learning a new language—Body Trust, intuitive eating, the radical idea that she could be enough as she was.

She became a Body Trust Certified Coach and eventually supported others on similar journeys. And then, almost without realizing it, she started to write. The play became a way to process what she'd been through. So did the friendships that brought it to life.

That fateful dinner happened across the street from her oncologist's office. Reilly mentioned an idea; her longtime friend and director, Juliet Kapanjie, said she wanted to direct something; their friend, Charlie Rubinovitz, said, “Well, you'll need someone to get butts in seats.” And so Hi Brow Productions was born.

A Play About What We Swallow

BELLY is a one-person show that moves between sharp, funny monologues and more heightened, poetic sequences. It tells the interwoven stories of three women across one family, each wrestling with appetite and control. There's Ellie, a high school swimmer groomed by a well-meaning, deeply harmful coach into disordered eating. Katie, Ellie's pregnant aunt, is trying to “do everything right” within the labyrinth of wellness culture and medical fatphobia. And Susan, Katie's mother, is newly widowed and learning how to live with grief and appetite in an empty house.

The 55-minute piece is essentially about control and its counterpoint: surrender. It's about the ways food and the body become vessels for every other story a family needs to tell. It's about the strange, specific pain of being a girl, a woman, an embodied person in a culture that profits from convincing you that your body is wrong.

“Belly is a story about eating disorders, but is secretly a story about grief,” Reilly explains. “I identify with so much of the show, but I'm particularly fond of a moment where one character gets emotional about mayonnaise in a sandwich, and another asks, 'If a peanut butter and jelly would be better today?' One of my favorite recovery principles is C-work—letting go of perfectionism when it comes to self-care, intuitive eating, healing. It dismantles the pressure that diet and wellness cultures push.”

That philosophy—that “good enough” is genuinely good enough—runs through the entire production. It's a show made by friends who stepped away from performance and found each other again. Juliet, who spent years working with chef Nancy Silverton. Charlie, who's been in the tech and entertainment industry. And Reilly, who knows in her bones what it means to want to be “right,” and what it costs.

Why This Moment Matters

The conversation around bodies and food is shifting. Ozempic, diet culture, the ways wellness has become just another form of control—these are things people are thinking about, talking about, desperate to understand. But that conversation can still feel abstract, intellectual. BELLY makes it personal. It roots it in the specific, sometimes messy, sometimes ridiculous, always deeply human details of three women's lives.

“I want to have a world that's engaged with nuance about food and body, that leaves people alone for their size and accommodates everyone joyfully,” Reilly says. “I want my daughter — who doesn't exist yet but who I think about all the time — to never wonder if there is something wrong with her arms, stomach, or thighs.”

That vision informs every choice in the show. It's why the humor lands — because Reilly and Juliet understand that laughter and pain often live in the same moment. It's why the show doesn't ask audiences to have it all figured out by the time they leave. It just asks them to consider: what if we were kinder to ourselves? What if we let good enough be enough?

Reilly O'Shaughnessy, a seven-year-old girl who fell in love with Eponine, is finally getting to tell her own unrequited love letter to the stage. But this time, it's not just a love letter to theater. It's a love letter to the possibility of recovery, to the people who show up for you, and to the strange, brave act of taking up space in your own life.

See BELLY

New York Previews:

59E59 Theaters, Theater C | July 22, 24, 25 at 8:30 PM (July 25 at 4:30 PM) | Part of 59E59's East to Edinburgh program

Edinburgh Festival Fringe:

Greenside @ George Street | August 6–29 (1:45 PM daily, off Sundays) | Previews August 6–9

For more information and tickets, visit www.reillykathleen.com or follow @get_reilled_up on Instagram.

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\n\n \n HI BROW PRODUCTIONS\nProudly Presents the World Premiere of\nBELLY\nEllie wants to swim in college, Katie wants a healthy baby, \nand Susan wants her husband to be alive. \n \n
\n HI BROW PRODUCTIONS is pleased to announce the world premiere production of Reilly O\u2019Shaughnessy\u2019s BELLY, directed by Juliet Kapanjie. BELLY is a one-person play about womanhood across three generations of, eating, grief, and control.
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