Heartbreakingly funny: Tatiana Hotere’s Skin Hunger bares all – again

Raised in a strict Catholic household, Tatiana Hotere raged against God after the loss of her husband five years ago. Photo / Michael Craig

The sudden death of her husband nearly destroyed Crazy Grief podcaster Tatiana Hotere. Her darkly comic survival story, Skin Hunger, was a hit at the Auckland Fringe Festival last September, when this article was originally published. Now it’s back for a return season, at Auckland’s Q Theatre. As told to Joanna Wane.

Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. They love you, but with every dish you're fed comes a hot, steaming glass of guilt. So the play is a lot about my struggle with shame, and that intersection between grief, religion and sexuality.

Each element I chose for the [publicity] poster was very intentional. When you see mascara running down a woman's face, you know she's been crying. That's my grief. I'm naked – although I don't really show anything – and I'm wearing a halo, because there's this whole thing about women being Madonna or a shameless whore. Rosary beads, of course.

I’m holding an apple, that sensual, forbidden thing; a glass of wine, and a pink vibrator, the first one I ever bought, after Jason died. Don’t buy it, though. There are better ones.

I'm from Brazil, where I was raised by my grandparents. My grandmother, who was Italian, was Roman Catholic and very staunch. I've always had this sense of awe at the beauty in the world and felt there must be God; there has to be something bigger than us. But religion is so divorced from the female presence. A "good" woman does not have one sexual bone in her body.

Hotere created the image for her "Skin Hunger" publicity shot using key symbols representing the play, from rosary beads to a pink vibrator. Photo / Andi Crown

When I met Jason, I was 23 and working as a dancer for a kind of Christian circus that put on shows all over the world. He was in the strong man team. I have a photo of him flipping a car. I didn't speak any English, and he didn't speak any Portuguese, but there was something really lovely and gentle about him. Now I know it's called mana. He had plenty of that. We courted, like good Christians. The first time we kissed was the night he asked me to marry him.

Jason was the head counsellor at St Peter's College and also working in the film industry as a truck driver. On May 9, 2017, he had a heart attack on the set of [TV show] Power Rangers at Bethells Beach. At 10pm, I heard a knock on the door. As I came down the stairs, I already knew. I remember holding on to the door knob for what seemed like forever, not wanting to open the door. A friend drove me out to the beach, where they'd laid his body on the ground and covered him with a blanket. I ripped it off and when I lay down with him, I felt a rage I had never felt before. I lived in that state of rage or fear for two years. Fear of going crazy. Fear of losing my health, because I became extremely ill. Fear of losing our two girls. For about a month, I wouldn't let them go to school because I was so scared to let them out of my sight.

In the play, Eva isn't me but she's based on me — she's lost her husband and she's stuck in her grief. But grief can make you horny! Nobody ever told me that. So Eva gives herself permission to explore her sexuality. She has some awful Tinder dates, like I did, and decides to take matters into my own hands, quite literally. But what she is really searching for is connection.

When somebody dies, there's no bouncing back. There's only plan B because you can never go back to being that person. There will never be Jason and Tatiana again. Now it's just me. I think my journey really has been, and that's in the play, this incredible need to be touched, this desperation of loneliness.

To know you are not alone in your loneliness can make all the difference. This play is for every woman who has lost a husband, a child, a job or her health and looks in the mirror each day and feels like she can't keep putting one foot in front of the other. But look at her — she's doing it. She can.

* Skin Hunger is on at Auckland’s Q Theatre, February 7-10, 2023. Hotere was photographed at the Auckland Art Gallery’s 2022 exhibition Heavenly Beings: Icons of the Christian Orthodox World. The artwork behind her is “Royal Doors with the Annunciation”, by 16th-century painter Onoufrios of Neokastro.