NPX Weekly Round-Up: Sin Eaters by Anna Oeyang Moench

An atmospheric horror investigates how viewing disturbing content on social media can drastically affect mental health, plus three more plays I'm excited to read.

Feb 03, 2025

Happy Monday everybody! This week’s play contains discussions of sexual violence, torture, murder, and other disturbing imagery, as well as centering a character who is unsure of reality and what is real at points in the story. If any of that is triggering for you, I wouldn’t add this one to your TBR. Take care of yourselves!

Let me just say it right now— paying the extra $8 a month to be able to search for plays by any possible metric on NPX is totally and completely worth it.

I have found so many new plays by a range of diverse playwrights about a seemingly even wider range of topics. My NPX library is full to bursting, and I’m getting to the point where I’m laying out my plays to review weeks in advance instead of just picking one and going with it each week. In doing this in depth exploring, I’m also seeing so many familiar names pop up! I see a lot of the same people in the recommending section, and I’m beginning to see trends on which playwrights plays are gaining traction. It’s really interesting to note, actually. What’s even more interesting (and sorta weird, honestly) to realize is that I know a lot of these people. Like, I have met them in person, worked with them, seen their plays, and/or am friends with them on social media. I guess when people say the theater community is actually pretty small, they’re sort of right! So, once again, hello out there all of my lovely theater friends. We’re probably a lot closer in a degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon way than we originally thought!

This week’s play is Sin Eater by Anna Oeyang Moench, a work that initially grabbed my attention due to its title. For people who had normal childhood interests— a sin eater was a person back in the seventeenth century or so in the UK area whose job it was to “absorb” a dying or dead person’s sins by eating a ritual meal. In doing this, they would supposedly inherit whatever punishment came with those sins in the afterlife. So, you can imagine who had to resort to this as a job, namely very poor people. I know, this is more dramaturgical context than I usually give, but it’s actually sort of important to the themes explored.

Anyways. Here’s the summary from NPX:

Mary is a content moderator, one of the unseen people who scrub our social media feeds of violent, sexual, and otherwise disturbing imagery. As she goes deeper and deeper into the dark rabbit hole of unfiltered human depravity that is the internet, she finds a graphic video that makes her question her relationship, her sanity, and her own capacity for violence. By plunging us into a job where technology meets drudgery, SIN EATERS examines how our daily toil transforms us from the outside in.

Sin Eater opens on a celebratory scene between Mary and her partner, Derek. Both are excited about Mary’s new tech job, a temporary position that has the potential to turn full time with cushy benefits. They live in a truly crappy apartment in Long Island, and hope that Mary getting this job will help them to save up more to eventually leave for greener pastures. Throughout this scene, we learn about two of the couple’s more loud and present neighbors: Reesie and Michael. Michael is a veteran, and Reesie is an older woman who seems to be experiencing a prolonged mental health crisis. Both seem to constantly be at each others’ throats in the hallways. The walls are thin, so Mary and Derek are constantly listening to these antics.

The job that Mary has just gotten is so secret that she had to sign an NDA before she was even interviewed, so we are unsure of her exact duties until the second scene. It is as a content moderator for a social media website called Between Us, where people post entirely anonymously. Here is where Mary herself learns just how bad the content she’s going to be sifting through is— her first reaction is to physically turn away in alarm and disgust. She asks what the protocol is for images that depict illegal activities or severely injured people, and is told to just delete the posts. After all, they don’t know who or where the people are, so what are they really supposed to do?

Mary begins the slog of going through post after disturbing post, usually muttering to herself as she goes along. As I read, I cringed for her each time she voiced what she was looking at. “Dick. Dick. Dick. Torture.” etc. Everything is going smoothly in that sort of way where you get used to seeing disturbing materials, until Mary sees something unthinkable: A video of Derek doing something…very illegal and disgusting. At least, she thinks it’s him. The help-desk guy at her job insists she’s seeing things, even giving a personal example of it happening to him. But Mary is so convinced that we as the audience become unsure of what was really on the video.

From here, we cannot be sure what’s real in any concrete way, which is what truly plops this play in the horror genre. Mary is, from our perspective, either slowly losing her mind or somehow being haunted by something taking the form of her partner, Derek. Mary sees yet another video at work wherein she believes she sees Derek committing a heinous act, and it all goes downhill rapidly from there. As we finally see the physical forms of her coworker, Gary, and her previously mentioned neighbors…they all look exactly like Derek (the roles are played by the same actor).

I won’t spoil the ending, because I feel like it will hit home better if I don’t, but rest assured it is awful and bloody and horrifying.

Let’s go back to that definition of ‘sin eater’ that I gave at the beginning, ie a person, most likely in need, who has resigned themselves to taking on the afterlife punishment of someone else to make money or gain food. Steve, the unseen help-desk guy at Mary’s work, sort of jokingly says that her job is to “eat the weirdo’s sins so normal people don’t have to”. This comparison of Mary, a person living paycheck to paycheck in a shitty apartment working at a place where she has to deal with trauma every day, to a sin eater taking on the metaphysical burdens of their neighbors in the 1700’s, is apt. Because Mary is part of the lower class, who historically have to take the ‘sin eater’ jobs, she is relegated to monitor a traumatic daily slog of BS in order to survive. If Mary had the money to move to the better apartment, to support herself and her musician boyfriend, she wouldn’t be at Between Us slowly chipping away at her mental health.

In my opinion, that’s one of the two big themes of this work: that traumatic, dirty, and unwanted jobs are always done by the people who can’t afford to do more desirable ones, and are taken for granted and stepped on by the upper classes. Very relevant, if you ask me!

The other theme is about the harm that being exposed to traumatic content daily can and will do to a person’s psyche. I certainly hope the average human isn’t seeing torture p*rn on the daily, but we are constantly hit with other dehumanizing and awful content on social media all the time. Namely, we are all consistently seeing content that is racist, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, etc all the time, no matter what social media platforms you frequent. This is especially prevalent since Elon’s acquisition of Twitter (boooooooo) and, of course, the election of Donald Trump (even bigger booooooo).

This piece takes its horror from a very real place, a place that many people, if not all of us, have seen a glimpse of. We have all accidentally seen something online (or in person, honestly) that we wish we hadn’t, something that sticks with you like gum on your shoe that you can’t really wash away. Imagine if you were forced to see those things for six to eight hours a day, five days a week. I don’t know about you, but I’d probably be well on my way to a grippy sock vacation after a week. So, it is almost understandable that Mary goes totally and completely off the rails. It’s not even far fetched to think that perhaps this sort of situation could cause a psychotic episode in even the most high functioning person. And that’s what makes this piece scary— the fact that this situation seems plausible.

What I’m taking away from this piece is that perhaps good horror, or good genre writing of most kinds, has at least a toe in reality. Whether that toe is a shitty job that people somewhere are definitely doing, or perhaps a news story that you extrapolate upon, or simply an emotion that most people can relate to, that toe gives your audience a way into your story (sorry to talk about toes so much).

Here’s my official recommendation from NPX:

This piece is so scary BECAUSE it feels like something that could actually happen to somebody. The dialogue is fast paced and absolutely jarring, creating an eerie atmosphere that creeps in slowly and then hits you all at once. And that ending? Absolutely brutal, but also shows just how serious the premise is. Felt this one in my bones.

What did you think of this play? Let me know in the comments!

A Playwright's Journey

Discussion about this post