Heart and Soul

He is a beef-boner, and that is a dangerous trade, especially when you are on piecework and trying to earn a bride. Your hands are slippery, and your knife is slippery, and you are toiling like mad, when somebody happens to speak to you, or you strike a bone. Then your hand slips up on the blade, and there is a fearful gash. And that would not be so bad, only for the deadly contagion. The cut may heal, but you never can tell. There are learned people who can tell you out of the statistics that beef-boners make forty cents an hour, but, perhaps, these people have never looked into a beef-boner’s hands.

Upton Sinclair’s great novel of the American slaughterhouse, The Jungle, was first published ninety years ago. We like to believe that our enlightened age yields little shelter for the “moral, spiritual and physical degradation” which Sinclair sought to expose, but as recently as three years ago, conditions as bad as anything described in The Jungle were discovered in a reputable meat processing plant in Louisville, Kentucky. A young worker had died after inhaling ammonia fumes, and the employees of Fischer’s Packing Co. decided to blow the whistle on the inhuman environment in which they were forced to work. It is the story of their struggles, both public and personal, that poet and playwright Naomi Wallace vividly brings to life in Slaughter City.

Ms. Wallace talked to Fischer’s employees as they stood on strike outside the factory near her Kentucky home. “I drove past the picket lines every day,” she recalls, “and started to wonder what kind of lives those people must lead. I knew that their lives were physically demanding, but not much else.” Their eyewitness accounts of life inside the slaughterhouses form the basis for almost all the episodes in the play. According to Ron Daniels, who is directing the American premiere of Slaughter City for the American Repertory Theater’s New Stages, descriptions of Packingtown in The Jungle also formed an important source for Wallace. “It’s a hugely important centerpoint of the play. The images are very violent, and Naomi wanted to create a world that is a hell.”

Despite the graphic violence and horror portrayed in Slaughter City, the play never strays far from the realms of metaphor and symbolism. Anticipating the films of Quentin Tarantino by almost a century, Sinclair argued in The Jungle that violence and poetry are fundamentally related:

It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory. One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog squeal of the universe.

Sinclair’s writing remained grimly naturalistic, however, while Slaughter City is a play of magic realism, steeped in enigmatic symbolism and small miracles which stand as oases in a wasteland of gore and decay. Beyond the grim walls of Fischer’s packing house lies a world of magical snow showers, Sunday fishing trips and mysterious visions of past lives. Despite the lyricism of such moments, however, Wallace is anxious to point out that although she made her name as a poet, Slaughter City is not simply dramatic poetry. “I try not to talk about myself as a poet writing for the stage, because I don’t consider my work poetic. Poetry can seem static, and my plays aren’t like that at all–they’re rugged and raw. But then my poetry isn’t particularly poetic either–it can be rugged also.”

Ron Daniels first directed Slaughter City for the Royal Shakespeare Company at London’s Barbican Centre earlier this year. His production has been recast with American actors for its second coming at the Hasty Pudding, but costumes and pieces of the set are being flown to Cambridge from Britain towards the end of March. The London critics were staggered by the raw energy of Wallace’s play, and in particular praised the delicate counterpoint which it traces between public and private events, the social disturbances in the factory and the increasingly tender relationships of the four central characters. Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, “The play has passion, poetry and a wild strangeness. Running through it is the Whitmanesque idea that sexual and economic liberation are inseparable. And Ron Daniels’ production is astonishingly successful at welding them together.”

It is this tension between the two spheres of existence in Slaughter City which first drew Daniels to Wallace’s work. “It’s a public play set in a public place,” he says, “which at the same time allows the individual’s fantasy life to express itself. These two struggles, public and private, make it very Shakespearean.” The play derives great power, Daniels believes, from the tenacity of its political stance. “In an age where the left has been demoralized by the traumas of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Berlin, and finally the Soviet Union, it’s very refreshing to have Naomi actually embracing that sense of search for justice and struggle for the poor, the helpless, the maimed. My heart goes out to that. We live in an era when the discarding of ideologies, when cynicism, cruelty, and not believing are very fashionable, and where belief, passion and conviction are not.”

Wallace recognizes that political drama is no longer in vogue; “It’s unusual now to see the lives and struggles of working people on the stage – we don’t really come across plays like that any more,” she says. “The lives and loves of these people are deeply connected. We can’t separate the-\ way they live their lives from the circumstances of where they work. That’s what interested me–portraying the lives of these people.”

Like Wallace’s other plays, In the Heart of America and One Flea Spare, Slaughter City tests the limits of dramatic structure and form. It was only when he reached the rehearsal room that Daniels realized quite how stylistically innovative the work really is. “The play very much begins in a kind of Brechtian, epic mould,” he says, “and then suddenly skids in different directions. It actually seems to veer away from itself. It’s not written by someone who is interested in structures and linear development, but by a poet. Naomi is interested in textures, in the fabric of human life, with all its contradictions, surprises and obstacles. All of this allows the play to have a peculiar life of its own.”

Daniels has always believed that his role as director is one of absolute service to the intention of the playwright. “There are two sorts of directors of new plays. The first kind will say, ‘My production, my concept, is what is important. The play is merely a pretext for my production. I know better. I have a vision.’ And then there are directors like me. I am a service. All I am trying to do is realize the author’s vision. My production, my concept, may be very strong and very bold, but it is merely at the service of clarifying and giving life to the vision that belongs to the poet. I believe that I have certain skills, of dramaturgy, staging, casting and so on, but ultimately we have to remember that this is a new play, and it is the author’s voice which is most important.”