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Nearly 30 years ago, the Royal Shakespeare Company and American Repertory Theatre both staged a magical-realist fable about a strike at a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant. Labor unions have grown less powerful over the decades, but the stings of racism and abuse and the matter of the haves vs. the have-nots remain as urgent as ever. Finally premiering in New York City, Naomi Wallace’s play Slaughter City feels, depressingly, not at all dated.
Fortunately, this production from Alex Winter and Small Boat Productions also revels in Wallace’s outlandish imagination and bold humor. Reuven Glezer directs a sturdy cast with flourishes of the visceral and the uncanny. The play is old-fashioned in a particular way: maximalist rather than icy and stripped-down, artistically elevated rather than ashcan realistic. The production gleefully embraces these elements.
Meatpacking line workers, their aprons covered in blood, goad each other, crush on each other, sing, laugh, and reminisce as they hack into carcasses with expertly sharpened knives. Most of the action lines up along or atop one long table that serves as the workspace both for the grisly labor and for the imagination. Two big personalities dominate. Le’Asha Julius’ smashing, multidimensional performance makes struggling line worker Roach the story’s moral and emotional fulcrum. Ben Natan’s Brandon lusts after her with a braggadocio that he wields to hide insecurity and maybe more.
Lucy Buchanan also delivers a strong performance as Roach’s best friend and co-worker Maggot. (The characters’ names cast part of the story’s spell.) Her crush is newcomer Cod (a pinpoint turn by KP Sgarro), a scab left over from a recent strike. But Cod is more than they seem.
Meanwhile plant manager Tuck (an affecting Gil Charleston) fumes under the racist thumb of company owner Baquin (Nicholas Eric Sanchez). Baquin’s character, a caricature of a turn-of-the-century capitalist, is one of the elements that lift the story into the realm of magic realism, both time-wise and as to what kind of animal he really is.
The focal story takes place, presumably, in the 1990s, but Baquin’s suit seems anachronistic. And what about the Sausage Man (Alan Simon), who wanders in and out with a hand-held meat grinder, dressed like a 19th-century immigrant, lamenting how things have changed since his day? We learn his significance, and more about the other characters, by the end.
We also learn the identity of the silent turn-of-the-20th-century seamstress whom we saw, working a skein of fabric at the long table, before the action begins. Indeed, in a way she makes especially meaningful this New York City production.
Wallace depicts in her characteristically unflinchingly way sexual harassment and racist humiliation from the victims’ point of view. What Roach and Tuck suffer to keep their jobs is excruciating to watch. So is Maggot’s stony expressionlessness under her boss’s roaming hands. On the flip side, depictions of hope and hunger for love and sex amid poverty and horrible working conditions strum our sympathetic strings in a more wholesome way. The intensity of some scenes, heightened by stormy lighting and sound and live music, raises the question of whether we’re in reality or a dream.
A deficit of the production is that some of the actors don’t always project enough for an un-miked, semi-in-the-round staging where characters are sometimes facing away from half the audience. That’s a pity because you really do want to hear every one of Wallace’s vivid lines of dialogue. But it isn’t a big enough problem to make one lose the thread of the story. The production is too big, too ambitiously, meatily wrought, for any danger of that.
Slaughter City runs through October 18, 2025 at A.R.T./New York Theatre’s Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre in Manhattan. Tickets are available online.
