'Pig Farm' Happily Rolls In The Muck
Playwright Greg Kotis has been thinking a lot about why swine are so disturbing.
"We look at them as kind of ridiculous animals because they're fat and they have the cloven hoofs," says Kotis, sitting on a couch at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre on the Friday before the opening of his latest production, "Pig Farm."
"And they're a little creepy because we know that they're really smart and they have eyes that look a little bit like ours, but they have these revolting noses, and also they exist for one reason: to be slaughtered and eaten."
Kotis' ripped jeans and clog sandals are as unpretentious as his comedies as he explains why pigs were such a logical focus for his follow-up to the surprise Broadway hit "Urinetown."
Like that mock-musical about a town with such a serious water shortage that people need "to pay to pee," "Pig Farm" takes an anxious look at people whose lifestyles can't possibly be sustainable.
The play reunites Kotis with "Urinetown" director John Rando, who is coming off the big-budget musical "The Wedding Singer."
In "Pig Farm," a sort of Sam Shepard play drained of nobility and romanticism, husband-and-wife pig farmers Tom and Tina try to keep Teddy, an Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrat, from getting too pokey during an annual count of their roughly 15,000 pigs.
Adding to their troubles is Tim, a juvenile delinquent with a thing for Tina and a tendency to sound like James Dean in his longing speeches about running away. The characters, Kotis and Rando explain, are the sort of salt-of-the-earth people who inhabit not just the plays of Shepard and Eugene O'Neill but also films such as "Giant" and "Hud" — blue-collar heroes who look bold and sexy as they fight for their simple lives.
"We wanted to smash these two kinds of plays together, the Sam Shepard sort of Americana classic — meaty acting, intense, very earnest ... with sort of wacky farcical elements," Rando said.
Though the cast has received generally good marks, not all theater critics have enjoyed visiting the farm.
The New York Times' review called the satire "unfocused and crude."
The Associated Press said the play would "delight" those "not opposed to a little mindless fun," but warned that "even the most willing participants might have their endurance tested by some of the same gags and jokes repeated beyond the limits of good sense and spontaneous humor."
Kotis and Rando are unapologetic about rolling in the muck.
The play's farcical approach means its would-be heroes have no cattle to rustle or stampedes to bravely put down. Their best chance to prove themselves comes during a pig run that's more absurd than terrifying.
The pigs allow Kotis and Rando to explore the central theme of both "Pig Farm" and "Urinetown" — how people respond to the realization that they'll eventually run out of resources.
It's the ominous feeling, Kotis says, that "if we're having fun, there must be some bill to come due for that fun."
His own suspicion is that people will avoid or put off paying the bill for as long as they can.
When one character proposes a new kind of pig farm — one that doesn't pollute, and has a manageable population of 200 pigs — he sounds as sympathetic as a supervillain explaining his plot to take over the earth.
"His plan from what I've read is what we should be doing," says Kotis, who visited pig farms to research the play. "And his plan simply is not possible."
What makes it impossible, he says, is humankind's refusal to accept change unless forced to do so. It's an observation the former political science major picked up from the famously bleak political economist Thomas Malthus, whom he readily quotes on the subject of population growth being checked by war and famine.
The idea for the play came from Hurricane Floyd, in which flood waters were filled with pig carcasses and sludge.
But rather than preach gloom-and-doom, Kotis opts to mine the comic potential of the gap between what people do and what they think they should.
He and Rando take pains to keep proselytizing out of their productions. In "Urinetown," that meant having two characters talk self-consciously about how most people will probably avoid the play because of its message.
In "Pig Farm," Kotis and Rando start dropping hints early on that they aren't as earnest as the material they're lovingly satirizing — starting with the absurd notion that two people could keep 15,000 pigs, even with the help of a juvenile delinquent.
"In theater, in order to create an anarchic world, you have to first create an orderly world," Rando says. "And then from that orderly world arises the confusion."