The Grief Eater Near North Bender

The Grief Eater Near North Bender is a play by Dylan Guerra, directed by Dustin Wills. Roundabout Theatre Company presents it at the Laura Pels Theatre as a limited engagement, produced in association with New York Theatre Workshop. It is a comic fable with a surreal streak, about love, loss and memory, and a monster hunt drives the plot.

Funding for the production comes from the Laura Pels Play Production Fund.

North Bender has a monster in its woods. The creature goes after whoever matters most to someone: it kills that person and also removes them from the survivor's memory. Residents of the town band together as a hunting party, hoping to stop the creature's next kill.

Three of them stand at the center: a grieving ex, his devoted sister, and a partner left with no memory of the man he loved. Their base is a local pub, where they make silver bullets and plan the hunt. The play also puts a hard question to them, whether getting those memories back would ease the loss or make it worse.

Guerra lives and works in New York as a writer and director, and he comes from Miami. He has written for the HBO Max series The Other Two and received the Weissberger/Harris Award for Playwriting in 2026. A 2024 Roundabout announcement listed commissions from Playwrights Horizons and Manhattan Theatre Club in his bio.

The script pairs a creature-feature premise with dark comedy. Its hunters work out of a local pub, and a 2024 description of the reading called the monster the Grief Eater.

As of October 2026, Kyle Beltran plays Angler and Florencia Lozano plays Tomlin. Annie McNamara is Maryanne, Marquis Kofi Rodriguez is Noland, Blake Russell is The Shepherd and Pete Simpson is Byron. McNamara received a Tony Award nomination for originating a role in Slave Play on Broadway, and Russell also has a Broadway credit in that production.

The play had a reading on February 12, 2024, in Roundabout's Underground reading series, with Wills directing. The full production is set to begin performances on January 21, 2027, with opening night on February 11, 2027.