Southern Gothic

The Cannibals of McGower County
TheaterWorks
Hartford
Aug. 7, 2026

Warning: This review contains slight spoilers for the play.

Friday night was my proper introduction to southern Gothic, and it has left quite an impression on me.

I went to see the world premiere of The Cannibals of McGower Country, the newest play by Drew Larimore. The play takes place in fictional McGower County in Texas, where Lindalyn (Annalee Jefferies) and Viola (Constance Shulman), a couple of salvagers, run into Blaze (Edward Hoke) and Sarah Nell (Gus Birney), a young couple in love who has just bought the bar, and the whole town, the salvagers are rummaging through.

In the case of The Cannibals, my usual man-off-the-street approach to reviewing was insufficient, because the play is described as “equal parts Southern Gothic thriller and dark comedy." I didn’t know what southern Gothic meant as a style, but that’s what the internet is for:

Southern Gothic literature is a distinct genre that intertwines elements of horror and grotesqueness to explore the complexities of Southern society …The narratives delve into themes of decay, horror, and the supernatural, frequently incorporating local myths and the haunting legacy of historical events, including slavery and the Civil War.

-EBSCO

That context is crucial to understanding the play. While The Cannibals doesn’t deal directly with slavery, war and the supernatural per se, the genre’s convention of exploring what sprouts from the cracks in an underlying foundation of cruelty and horror is well-represented through the characters.

Blaze (Edward Hoke) and Sarah Nell (Gus Birney) look towards the future (Curtis Brown Photography)

It turns out that Lindalyn is Sarah Nell’s mother. She’s run away from her abusive mother and is head over heels with Blaze, the son of a Texas oil man who has used his father’s fortune to buy a dilapidated Texas town (which you can really do), including a bar– by sheer coincidence, the very bar Lindalyn and Viola are ransacking.

The impact the past has on the present is a major part of the play. Blaze is running from a history of business failure. He changed his name and became, in his own words, a “cosplay cowboy” to try to find some success. Viola, despite being well into her adulthood, is running from her own abusive mother, the same as Sarah Nell.

The only character who is comfortable with the way things are, and even seems to want to go back to the past, is Lindalyn. She constantly berates Viola, then Blaze when she meets him, and finally her own daughter with the ways they have apparently failed her, and tries to hold them in place with imagined guilt while she ignores her own.

There are shocking surprises and happenings in the play that I won’t spoil, but suffice to say that the events are befitting of the southern Gothic genre. I openly cringed and even looked away at certain times. I heard audience members exclaim and gasp. It’s worth seeing the play just for those moments.

It’s also worth seeing for the performances. Birney and Hoke portray idealistic, somewhat ditzy young people who think that the shadows of the past will never fall on them again; as anyone who has lived long enough knows, what goes around comes around and comes back around again.

Viola is also memorable as the closest thing the play has to comic relief. In a clever move, playwright Drew Larimore doesn’t have Viola tell jokes or be outrageously silly. She’s simply a bubbly personality in a dark world. The audience is laughing at her, underscoring the hopelessness of her life as she tries to just be.

Annalee Jefferies is the star of the show. It’s Lindalyn’s story, and she delivers all the rage and violence and pathetic justifying I could stomach. The play is only 90 minutes; that's a good thing, because I don’t know how much more of Jefferies’ intensity I could take. She made me and everyone else in the audience squirm every time she moved.

The irony of the play is that Lindalyn is constantly decrying the “cannibals” of the world to her daughter, telling her that all of the terrible things she’s done to her were for her own good to keep her safe. But the only cannibal on stage is Lindalyn. She doesn’t eat the flesh of her victims. She consumes their lives for her own gross nourishment. That dynamic mirrors the history of the South, and the United States as a whole.

Make sure you go see this great at TheaterWorks. Even if you have to look away every now and again.