Past Shows
Slaughter City
"
Wallace's drama hits with an emotional
directness as potent as its intellectual force."
— Robert Hurwitt, S.F. Chronicle
"Novick handles Wallace's broad, bloody
canvas well...The cast...is completely committed to making this dreamlike—occasionally
nightmarish—play work...Slaughter City is a powerful,
unsettling experience."
— Chad Jones, Oakland Tribune
Slaughter City
by Naomi Wallace
directed
by Rebecca Novick
played April 8 – May 8, 2004, at the EXIT
Theatre, in San Francisco.
Based on real-life conditions in a modern day Southern slaughterhouse, Slaughter
City begins as the story of lifelong friends Roach (who is African-American)
and Maggot (who is white) working side by side on the line, helplessly
watching their lives bleed away under the greedy eye of their racist,
union-busting boss. Into this brutal reality appears the mystical character
of Cod, the child of a woman killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire nearly a century before. Neither alive nor dead, man nor woman,
by his very presence Cod turns all the assumptions the slaughterhouse
workers
hold
on their heads, and unleashes desires the numbed employees never imagined
they would feel again. Through characters that are simultaneously symbolic
and deeply human, Wallace celebrates the power of the worker to rise
above the system, the power of the past to change the future, and the
power of desire to make us embrace what we fear most.
Featuring: John Atwood, Gillian Chadsey, Paul Lancour, Alan Quismorio,
Michael Wayne Rice*, Ellen Scarpaci, Juliet Tanner, Mollena Williams
Scenic Design: Pegeen McGhan
Costume Design: Bree Hylkema
Lighting Design: Dave Robertson
Sound Design: Cliff Caruthers
Composer: David Rhodes
Stage Manager: Michelle Thomas
Assistant Stage Manager: Jarrod Fischer
Assistant Director: Katy Hilton
Dramaturg: Hannah Knapp
Photographer: Jeff Prucher
*Member Actors' Equity Association. An Equity Approved Project.