SLAUGHTER CITY: 50% Bitter

Photo courtesy of Son of Semele.

SWEET
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.’
Brad Schreiber – Backstage

BITTERSWEET
Throw in anti-Semitism, homophobia and gender discrimination, add several musical numbers (courtesy of composer Andrew Ingkavet) and a dose of comic relief, and you’d have enough plot material for 10 such shows. But Wallace then adds the parallel storyline of the otherworldly, ambisexual scab, Cod (Noelle Messier), his/her love for Roach’s gal pal, Maggot (Sarah Boughton), and hate for the mysterious, Mephistophelian Sausage Man (Alexander Wells), and the play’s message — along with its indignation — all but disappears in the resulting fog of metaphors. Director Barbara Kallir and a talented ensemble’s efforts to bring clarity to the chaos are only occasionally rewarded.
Bill Raden – LA Weekly

BITTER
The play itself, and, more to the point, the direction and acting, do not live up to the tech. The three main killing floor workers are played by Sarah Boughton, Christopher Emerson and Christina Ogundade. Ms. Ogundade as Roach does have some wonderful and affecting moments and her anger at life in general and love for her best friend are quite genuine. Ms. Boughton as the hard bitten Maggot obviously understands that her character is what most would consider “Poor White Trash” but tends toward the “If you don’t quite know what you’re doing, do it with intensity” style of acting. Mr. Emerson is quite good looking but a bit miscast as the unpredictable, dangerous but talented cutter, Brandon. He has moments on stage that speak more to his willingness as an actor to give his performance over to complete abandon than to the internal torment of the outwardly charming character. It is also hard to believe that this almost Tom Cruise-like young man has spent any time at all doing the hard labor required of a slaughter house worker.
Geoff Hoff – LA Theatre Review