Playwright: Naomi Wallace
At: GroundUp Theatre at Steep Theater, 3902 N. Sheridan Rd.
Phone: ( 773 ) 944-0959; $15
Runs through: Dec. 17
If reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in English class didn't make you swear off eating meat, then this play won't, either—but it might encourage you to check for the Union Label on your next package of Smokey-Links. And even if you're already a vegetarian, Naomi Wallace's poetry of steaming blood and soul-stifling despair will have you contemplating the metaphors concealed in your food.
Any 20th-century American drama that pits Unions against Bosses can be predicted to favor the former, just as any play set in a slaughterhouse arrives with a ready-made atmosphere of menacing brutality. And while the Kentucky-born Wallace well knows her region's history as regards labor relations ( and after last spring's production of The Kentucky Cycle, so do WE ) , her goal is not to fight the old battles. Oh, the villain of her 1996 play is a satanic incarnation of her factory's capitalist-baron founder, but the plant boss moos like one of his own cows, the floor manager visualizes himself on an auction block, and our hero claims to have been born amid the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire nearly a century earlier.
Wallace's characters speak in a loosely-rhymed lyrical prose that retards our comprehension initially, but eventually blossoms into intoxicating images of, literally, carnal transcendence. But this GroundUp Theatre production enlarges on her expressionism with the addition of Peter Waldman's incidental music, based in traditional mountain ballads and IWW anthems, caroled a cappella in Appalachian harmonies by a chorus of hillbilly angels, who also portray an array of doomed animals. Sabrina Lloyd directs an ensemble whose focus never wavers despite their crowded storefront stace, together conjuring scenes of urgent intensity that swiftly engage our empathy—in particular, 'e.e.' O'Neill as Cod, the gender-ambiguous waif cruelly enslaved to Don Johnson's creepy Sausage Man.
Playgoers seeking cut-and-dried Brechtian propaganda will not find it here. But those who can see the terrible beauty in lovers kissing around a knife-blade, or partners in a jitterbug dance suddenly changing into a butcher gutting a freshly killed carcass, will be spellbound by the sanguine romance of Slaughter City.
