Lucy Buchanan and Ben Natan in Slaughter City. Photo: Matt Cubillos
At their best, Naomi Wallace’s plays get inside their characters in a visceral, blood-and-guts-and-decay way; the materiality of the human body is never far from the surface. Slaughter City, first produced in 1996 in the UK but receiving its New York premiere now, is set mostly in a meat-packing facility in Kentucky (Wallace’s home state, where many of her plays take place). It has blood and guts aplenty—much of it bovine or porcine—but its human dynamics don’t fully come to light in this production, directed by Reuven Glezer.
Wallace is explicitly writing the story of a labor action more than the people in it–as she says in a recent interview with The Brooklyn Rail, “It’s not about the emotional stories of these individuals. It’s about a group of people heading toward a crisis.” The play operates on two levels at once: a here-and-now drawn from conversations Wallace had with striking meat-packers in Louisville, and a magic-infused elsewhere (elsewhen, really), unanchored in time and sliding through a hundred years of American labor struggles. But even if we’re not meant to spend time parsing the characters’ emotional stories, we still need to feel invested: in the action, in the environment. This production all too often feels abstract and static, a generic factory environment rather than a breathing, seething site of conflict and crisis.
The program opens with a quote from Bertolt Brecht, and that’s clearly the model (Wallace also cites him in the Rail interview and the same quote appears as an epigraph to the script), but the true Brechtian “alienation effect” requires an exceptional degree of clarity in both writing and acting, an ability to activate at the same time fiction’s suspension of disbelief and a more intellectual engagement with the fact of being in a room watching a play. Slaughter City’s two different registers double the difficulty here, and that clarity never emerges. The relationships among characters are plotted out, but we never get under their skins: rather than intellectual engagement supplanting psychological identification, we skate along the surface of these people. And the second level, where narrative and character are unhitched from the concrete circumstances of the play, remains murky and opaque. (Only toward the end, when this strand sits long enough in one event, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, to evoke it with specificity, we see how the dynamic might have worked more effectively.)
On the meat-packing line, Maggot (Lucy Buchanan), Roach (Le’Asha Julius), and Brandon (Ben Natan) wrangle carcasses, working themselves to the bone trying to worm their way into the highest-paying tiers. They’ve just come back to work after a strike with the contract still unsettled, and some of the strike-breaking scabs are still around–notably Cod (KP Sgarro), a squirrelly stranger who seems to get lost inside their own mind and/or time when asked a direct question about their past. Brandon, a young white hothead, is the most skilled with his knife but also is always on the verge of disciplinary action. He’s got a thing for Roach, a Black woman fifteen years his senior, whose bone-deep knowledge of how little she can expect from the world has made her cynical. Roach’s white best friend, Maggot, for her part, is oddly fascinated by the elusive Cod.
On the management side, there’s the pencil-pushing Baquin (Nicolas Eric Sanchez)—a character that goes beyond Brechtian archetype into pure caricature, without a redeeming element—and Tuck (Gil Charleston), a Black line manager who’s risen through the ranks to end up stuck between his own ambition and his ethics. Finally, we have the more mysterious characters: a textile worker from an earlier era (Gabrielle Kogut) and the Sausage Man (Alan Simon), a figure who’s unmoored in time and mysteriously tied to, or in opposition to, Cod. He, too, leans over the line between archetype and stereotype; his Dutch accent is gratingly comical and his cryptic control over Cod baffling.
As a tale from the trenches, Slaughter City occasionally sizzles: Natan’s Brandon has an unpredictable edge to him, and when he and Roach are flirting despite her better judgment, there’s a spark. The sheer ground-down weariness of the meat-packing workers is palpable, as is the struggle within Charleston’s Tuck between his ambition for himself and the conscience and solidarity that he needs to squelch in order to do this job. But the details of the labor action feel too thinly sketched–we keep hearing about the same two sticking points in the contract negotiations, but we only get a full picture of how dire the working conditions are toward the end of the play, in a confrontation between Tuck and Baquin.
What Cod and the Sausage Man are up to remained very unclear-–Cod seems to have lived nearly a hundred years, somehow fomenting (or feeding on?) labor activism, but their journey from scab to union worker to activist to hero in this time and place, and from reviled outsider to complicated but unachievable semi-romance with Maggot, never gelled.
The production elements don’t help much–Forest Entsminger’s set uses the vertical space cleverly to move the carcasses up and down from the line, but too much of the staging is anchored on top of and around a central table, which often leaves the characters facing each other and with their backs to at least half of the audience. The lighting is shadowy past the point of being atmospheric and into making it harder to follow the action. (To be fair, there were some technical issues with the lighting instruments at the show I saw, which may have contributed to the dimness.) And Glezer hasn’t found a solid stylistic language to differentiate between the play’s varying levels of reality, which undercuts the effect of their clash.
Slaughter City’s issues about the struggles between management and labor remain timely (or timeless). But in the end, I didn’t feel that this production really let us understand the stakes, or feel the weight of history.