"Eviction"
Planet Ant Theatre
Hamtramck, Mich.
July 20, 2025
A meme went around last year asking women if they were stranded alone in a forest, would they rather encounter a bear or a strange man. To the apparent surprise of many men, a lot of women chose the bear, highlighting the depth and frequency of the fear that women experience toward men.
While I can’t say for sure which I would pick, the question was supposed to be a wake-up call to men about the harassment and trauma women face from them on a regular basis.
“Eviction,” a dark comedy written and directed by Mary Moore-Butler, addresses that fear through an extreme – though sadly not uncommon – scenario: abduction and violence. The show made its world premiere last week at Planet Ant Theatre.
Marley (Skylar Courtney) and Brittney (Adie Harig) have just moved into an apartment complex run by a friendly but odd landlord Norman (Dylan Mirisola). Norman – a fairly typical “nice guy” incel-type – is lonely and abducts the women, locking them in a separate apartment so he can keep his “best friends” forever.
After awakening to their new surroundings the women react in different ways. Marley reacts how you’d expect a kidnapped woman to react: She’s angry and resistant to Norman’s attempts at “friendship” (“Movie night!”) and is always looking for her chance to escape. Brittney is an overly perky, Valley girl-type who embraces Stockholm Syndrome with a vengeance. She finds Norman fun (“Captivity activity!”) and starts to fall in love with him, despite his fits of rage and violence after innocuous slights. The girls – previously strangers – begin to bond in their isolation. We learn that the ever-positive Brittney is severely damaged. After being abandoned by her mother and later losing her father to alcoholism, she suffered abuse through the foster system. As an adult, her “first love” was another kidnapper, and she expressed frustration after he was killed during her rescue.
Brittney I found interesting. So often when I read relationship horror stories, I wonder how women could possibly stay with these awful men for as long as they did and why they even entered relationships when you know those men must have flown their red flags high right from the start. Brittney’s naïve character – she was willing to run into the arms of anyone that gave her the slightest bit of attention – shed light on that. Brittney had a childhood of abandonment and abuse; at one point she mentions almost taking her own life. While certainly an extreme case, Brittney demonstrates the relationship vulnerabilities that kind of childhood trauma creates. When one’s self-worth is that low, any crumb of attention is mistaken for desperately sought-after love, despite any level of abuse.
In an interesting choice, Norman doesn’t actually exhibit any sexual desire or abuse towards the girls. In fact, his “daytime Norman” persona is more like that of a gay best friend or child. Nevertheless, he still exhibits the “nice guy” syndrome of a man who doesn’t understand why his creepy behavior is rejected by women, despite initially acting “nice.” When his “nice” behavior isn’t reciprocated, he acts out. (They say men will do anything but go to therapy.)
The show’s ending reveals a surprise twist that offers an explanation for Norman’s rage and loneliness (a Professor Lupin-style twist). While amusing, it seems to justify Norman’s toxic behavior, as if we need another excuse to let men off the hook for their actions.
The show’s marketing bills it as an exploration of loneliness and obsession. Between that and its unnecessary final twist, I don’t think the creators fully recognize the extent to which they tackled serious, important material. In the age of the “manosphere,” mass shootings, the male loneliness epidemic and basically all of history, women are frequent targets of male violence. This is not just loneliness. This is male loneliness, and it’s self-inflicted.
Why did Norman target women if sexual fulfillment wasn’t his motivation? If the show wanted to focus solely on the universal human experience of loneliness and obsession, they could have made Norman a Norma or perhaps made Norman explicitly gay or all of the characters male, because there’s no other way to remove the violence imbalance between men and women.
I think there’s a lot of potential with “Eviction.” The cast was stellar, I appreciated the colorful grannycore set and the use of film projections. But instead of leaning into a really important subject matter, it shied away.
