Slaughter City

First produced by the Royal National Theatre in the Pit, Slaughter City presents the gritty world of a meat-packing plant in lyrical terms. The workers, grappling with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, are forced to reconsider their relationship to one another when a stranger, a time-traveler of sorts, appears on the kill-floor to labor with them. The play offers stark images of realism alongside surreal moments of dance, poetry, and raw sexuality. Drawing heavily on an expressionistic tradition, Wallace often tells the story through the subjective eyes of Cod, the time-traveler. Because of the political and unrealistic nature of Wallace's play, she was forced to look to England for production of this play, but I was happy to have discovered it in my travels to London. I treasure the sensual language that transforms everyday things like driving a pickup truck into a passionate race that reverberates coming off the tongue as much as the roaring engine she describes. Slaughter City is beautiful and disturbing in production, but it offers a message of hope as the workers in her play find liberaion throught their relationship with one another. As beautiful to read as it is to watch, Slaughter City marks the beginning of what should be a distinguished career as a dramatist. A prodigy of Kushner, Wallace follows up Slaughter City with One Flea Spare