Review: Fat Pig by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson

Theatre en Bloc produced this Neil Labute play, directed by Derek Kolluri, at the Off Center in east Austin. The two-word title, Fat Pig ,is one of the most succinct and apt descriptions of the premise and theme of a play ever.

 

The play is about bodies and human beings’ reactions to difference. In exposition, Charles P. Stites in the secondary role of Carter spoke the insightful passages, about how we don’t trust differences of any kind, including especially those of overweight. He offered this enlightenment to alleviate the profound discomfort of his friend Tom (Ryan Hamilton) at being in love with an overweight woman (Helen, played by Zena Marie Vaughn).

 

When one exposes a shred of difference, one stands out from the herd, and the herd turns on one with a vengeance. This play could serve as an archival index of advanced derogatory terms for overweight people, starting with “whale” and “tank” and growing worse from there. Mild terms like “fat” and “plump” were not included. Helen, as one so exposed, sought protective coloration in her job as a librarian, or “printed word technician.”

 

Playwright Labute, having explored this premise colorfully, seemingly wrote himself into a corner when it came to resolving some of its issues and ending the play. Carter’s recommendation to the discomfited Tom was this: you’re only young once, go out and live like it. Like what? Carter’s point seems to be don’t waste your youth dating fat girls.

 

Those who know and appreciate Stites particularly enjoyed the irony of his characteristically assertive performance. In real life -- or at least in the Facebook semblance of it -- he's a great admirer of Rubens beauties, euphemistically referred to as 'plus sizes.'

 

Labute doesn’t elaborate much on life goals. Carter drinks in bars and seeks one-nighters with more appropriately shaped women, a behavior pattern that's hardly a road map for people trying to navigate their youth. His self-satisfied arrogance is contradicted forcefully in the play by Jeannie (Jenny Lavery). Jeannie, at the age of 28, laments the youth lout pattern and wonders angrily if all men are like that --by which she means lying, drinking, triflers. Jeannie’s sad, frustrating experiences with men are a source of anger for her, and that rage erupts into the one scene of stage violence in the play, well executed, on which everything pivots. We take Jeannie’s point clearly. But with that Labute is finished offering us kernels of insight.

 

Tom is attractive, shallow, and truth-challenged. Feelings wash over him in waves, but he can scarcely articulate them. He's perpetually astonished that he feels an attraction to the fleshy Helen. Conveying such a character is a difficult acting task, and Ryan Hamilton accomplished it well.

 

 

Zena Marie Vaughn as the title character faced the most difficult challenge of all, but she rose above it with her great sense of commitment. She applied her physicality with boldness. She's onstage facing the audience when the house is opened, reading a book and enjoying a pizza. Her pleasure in both is evident and she silently wins our sympathy from the first minutes as we wait for the action to begin. Once Tom appears and asks to share her area of the counter, she's open, funny and unabashed. Winningly, she gave us her rich, characteristic Zena-laugh. Zena regularly works box offices and behind the scenes in theatres in Austin and Round Rock, but on the evidence of this performance audiences would vastly prefer to see her onstage.

 

 

A technical note: Things did not go well on opening night. The actors were ready and energized, but unfortunately the set design was too ambitious and could not be smoothly executed in the Off Center space with Theatre en Bloc’s current level of production support. The set was a modular mechanical design with set components moving in and out of downstage center between scenes. Several times the large set pieces caught on each other and would not move fully into place. A few times these and other problems left the prior scene’s set almost fully exposed and lit. At other times, a set in place bled light off the sides of the stage to reveal an actor out of character waiting to make an entrance in the current scene or the next scene. And at odd times the backstage with its mops, brooms, ladders, and tumbled props lay exposed to view. I sat house center and should not have seen any of these stage-peripheral distractions. It was difficult to build back the theatre magic after so many glitches and woopsies. More design testing and practice would have helped.

 

On the second night after a twenty-five minute technical delay, the set movements were smoother, but at times offstage areas were view. There was an uh-oh moment when one of the black muslin drapes snagged on a moving set piece but Hamilton caught it neatly and threw it back up and over into the darkness, to a murmur of approval from the house.

 

Resolution of those purely technical problems is likely for this show. Blake Addyson, credited with sound design and original music, is also an experienced technical director. No, let's be clear about that: Mr. Addyson is a true Gandalf of all things technical theatre, and he worked his wizardry on the complex and ambitious Zeus in Therapy last August at the Rollins Studio Theatre. He made of it far more than the show’s producers had dared hope. Without doubt, Mr. Addyson and his savvy crew will resolve many of the technical problems with Fat Pig.

  

LaBute is cruel to his characters and indirectly to his audiences. His scripts emphasize the mean and selfish aspects of the game of life and love, and the tension in this piece arises from waiting to see if the beauty of Helen's soul, persona and figure can overcome the inherent deficiencies of social convention and the male sex.

 

Director Derek Kolluri came out at the end of the opening night's show and offered complimentary tickets for later performances, when the glitches were resolved. I put my name on the comp list, hoping to see again this flawed but worthy play about all our bodies, performed by a well-directed and courageous cast, one deserving of a smoother performance experience.

 

Fat Pig runs through October 20^th at the Off Center in east Austin. Tickets are on a sliding scale $15 - $35 and available online through www.buyplaytix.com.

 

Co-written with Michael Meigs.

 

 

Feature by Wayne Alan Brenner in the Austin Chronicle, October 2

 

Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 Seeing Things blog, October 6

Review by David Robinson for www.examiner.com, October 10

Review by Elizabeth Cobbe for the Austin Chronicle, October 17

 

EXTRAS

Click to view the Theatre en Bloc program for Fat Pig

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fat Pig
by Neil LaBute
Theatre en Bloc