If you like your comedy scrambled with a side of bacon, Greg Kotis’ Pig Farm may meet your minimum requirements. Many in this matinee audience laughed up the afternoon snack like a bag of pork rinds, but after a week rooting through our notes and memories, we still find too much trifle and not enough truffle in the mud being slung on South Coast Repertory’s Julianne Argyros Stage through January 28.

Martin Benson’s direction pushes his players to reach for laughs, not trusting that the script can deliver them more naturally. Odd, since it was Benson who first showed the script's promise in a reading on this stage more than a year ago. That seated rendering, sans the slapstick and scenery, forced the play to reveal its true heart, or the absence of one. 

What many heard in Kotis' voice was a Sam Shepard foreboding cut with Steve Martin silliness. Here, however, the silliness has been supercharged with the kind of antics that made Smokey and the Bandit a classic. Apparently, this has been the case in the Pig Farm’s only previous mountings: a 2006 East Coast-West Coast co-premiere between Manhattan’s Roundabout and San Diego’s Old Globe.

The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood, who sensed Martin McDonagh ambitions in the New York production, nevertheless felt “the humor here is of a far more dopey kind, relying on truckloads of mugging.” Coincidentally, Benson was responsible for both of SCR's superior McDonagh stagings.

Kotis, book writer for the hit musical Urinetown, may have something to say about the excesses of government oversight, but it would take a rabid Libertarian to find consistent anti-government meaning in this two-hour, two-act, one-joke farce. After all, Kotis portrays these farmers as such willful abusers of common sense and environmental care that they are the perfect examples of why we need government oversight. Since that makes the political dimension moot, we're left to rely on the comedy.

The story involves a couple, Tom (Steve Rankin) and Tina (Blake Lindsley), who run a rundown pig farm upriver of the nation’s capital. The house Thomas Buderwitz has designed for him, while a wonder of detailed stagecraft, paints them as dismal failures at running their business. It's a rainy — and therefore muddy — night when Tom has to deal with Teddy (JD Cullum), an EPA agent who is up for the count.