Only a playwright as talented as Naomi Wallace could craft a work set in a slaughterhouse that is this lyrical and creative. Childhood friends Roach (Christina Ogunade) and Maggot (Sarah Boughton) work together in a hellish slaughterhouse with little hope of their union improving their lot in life. Young, handsome, overeducated Brandon (Christopher Emerson) pursues the elder, cautious Roach but is rebuffed. Meanwhile, Roach is smitten with a curious newcomer, Cod (Noelle Messier), who it turns out has a mystical, demonic connection to Sausage Man (Alexander Wells), who puts pressure on the management to push the workers harder and harder.
Director Barbara Kallir has a tall order here—working with rich language, singing, and choreographed meat-cutting, much knife-handling, and, at its core, a dual love story that competes with Wallace’s sometimes hallucinatory imagery. By and large, she succeeds. Tremendously focused work from Ogunade, Boughton, Emerson, and Messier makes this sordid but soaring tale come to life. The playwright subtly slips rhyming schemes into early exchanges of dialogue and simultaneously excels at simple, poetic, heartbreaking lines from her earthier characters. Maggot exhaustedly admits, 'When I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep because I thought about death. Now I think about it the way I think about a bowl of cereal: I can take it or leave it.'
One weakness in the otherwise strong performances: Bart Petty plays Baquin, the vicious slaughterhouse manager, with too much stridency and twitchiness. Despite this, much like Wallace’s play 'One Flea Spare,' set during the Black Plague in London, this work steeps itself in the power of human connection in the most dreadful of environments. Sound design by Joseph Slawinski and the simultaneously fascinating and repugnant 'carcass design' by Janne Larsen help evoke the wretchedness of the workers’ everyday existence.
Presented by and at Son of Semele Theater, 3301 Beverly Blvd., L.A. Feb. 19–March 21. Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. (Exception: Sun., 8 p.m., March 21. Added performances Mon., 8 p.m. March 8–15 and Sat., 3 p.m., March 13. Dark Sun., March 7.) www.sonofsemele.org.