Slaughter City [Paperback]

Naomi Wallace (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1997

A play set "somewhere in the past" in a US sausage-making factory where the workers are subjected to harassment and impossible production schedules.

Product Details

• Paperback: 91 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (March 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 057117812X
• ISBN-13: 978-0571178124
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,371,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry in meat-packing, November 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Slaughter City (Paperback)

First produced by the Royal National Theatre in the Pit, Slaughter City presents the gritty world of a meat-packing plant in lyrical terms. The workers, grappling with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, are forced to reconsider their relationship to one another when a stranger, a time-traveler of sorts, appears on the kill-floor to labor with them. The play offers stark images of realism alongside surreal moments of dance, poetry, and raw sexuality. Drawing heavily on an expressionistic tradition, Wallace often tells the story through the subjective eyes of Cod, the time-traveler. Because of the political and unrealistic nature of Wallace's play, she was forced to look to England for production of this play, but I was happy to have discovered it in my travels to London. I treasure the sensual language that transforms everyday things like driving a pickup truck into a passionate race that reverberates coming off the tongue as much as the roaring engine she describes. Slaughter City is beautiful and disturbing in production, but it offers a message of hope as the workers in her play find liberaion throught their relationship with one another. As beautiful to read as it is to watch, Slaughter City marks the beginning of what should be a distinguished career as a dramatist. A prodigy of Kushner, Wallace follows up Slaughter City with One Flea Spare

2.0 out of 5 stars Tackling too much, October 5, 2010

By 

Scot Moore "lenina4sammy" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slaughter City (Paperback)

While I don't make it a habit of reviewing theatrical works, I was lent a Naomi Wallace collection a couple months ago and instructed to read "Slaughter City". It was pursuant to a discussion, the exact context of which somehow escapes me. That aside, I had read "The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek" some time ago and figured it would make for a good read regardless.

Unfortunately, I felt much less moved by "Slaughter City" than "Trestle" and for mostly mechanical reasons. The characters are well-developed, believable, and moving. They're original, creative, and go far to make the play meaningful. But, it's that "meaningful-ness" that eventually causes us to not care about those very same characters.

Here's why that happened. At the outset, Wallace seemed to want to write a play about character relationships in a strained, lower-class work environment. Had that been the ultimate focus, it might have worked. But, her focus didn't stop there. Within the first three scenes, the play became about union politics, racism, employee safety laws, ageism, classicism, gay rights, androgyny, extra-dimensional beings, and possibly more subjects I can't currently recall.

It's scatter-shod and any brilliance each of the characters has is completely lost among the weight of the myriad subjects the playwright is trying to address. True, "Trestle" makes a similar attempt at covering multiple subjects, but it does so within a confined space, time, and structure making it easier to swallow. "Slaughter City" is simply a mess that doesn't know how to clean itself up. Although, to her credit, Wallace ends the play prior to resolving any of the subplots, thereby creating a form of consistency in chaos.

There are technical aspects to the show that also cause problems. There are animal carcasses all over the place, knives, fights, multiple sets, and a million other things that make the show horribly expensive to produce. Perhaps the best way to approach it would be to produce it with no set or props at all - just some blocks and a few curtains. The biggest problem with that is there are a number of lines that directly reference things that happen with props or sets that won't make sense without their presence. I realize that a good playwright shouldn't be concerned with the production elements of the play, just with telling a story. Sadly, the story here can't hold up on its own so the play ends up being expensive to produce with no payoff for the audience.

It might have been nice to address the topics in this play over a series of pieces about lower-class labor in the United States. As it stands, it functions best as a source for some wonderful characters and even better audition monologues for actors.