About This Show
Crowded Fire Theater Company presents the West Coast Premiere of Naomi Wallace’s Slaughter City, a bloody hymn to the transcendent power of desire. Boundaries dissolve between employer and employees, man and woman, and past and present as relationships heat to a dangerous melting point in the crucible of a Kentucky slaughterhouse. The play is directed by Crowded Fire Artistic Director Rebecca Novick.
Based on actual events at a modern-day 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 slaughterhouse 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.
