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Greg Kotis.
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Greg Kotis's new satiric fable, Pig Farm, rubs mud on some American myths.
An Interview by Randy Gener
Playwright Greg Kotis is a veteran of the Neo-Futurists, the wild Chicago-based theatre company who created the popular Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a surreal improvisatory vaudeville in which the actors perform 30 random short plays in 60 minutes. Fate determines your ticket price as you roll dice at the box office. This experience clearly influenced the Cape Cod-born playwright and actor. As a comic strategy, Kotis often “Neo-Futurizes” his subjects.
It's not exactly like zapping food in a microwave, but the effects can be similar: You get a sense that a smart, irreverent mind has irradiated some aspect of the real world, cooking up a goo of dark satire. Kotis's main claim to fame is as half of the nutty songwriting duo responsible for the Tony Award®-winning musical Urinetown (along with longtime collaborator and composer Mark Hollmann). Urinetown borrows from the playful, deconstructive spirit of the Neo-Futurists by calling attention to itself from the get-go: “Hello, and welcome to Urinetown. Not the place, of course. The musical.”
Pig Farm promises to generate some of that same edgy, droll heat. Kotis's new play, premiering June 9 at the Laura Pels Theatre and starring Katie Finneran, Logan Marshall-Green, and Denis O'Hare, is not a sequel to Urinetown. It is, however, charged by a similar sense of fierce, reckless, and fantastic logic—traits that come naturally to all Neo-Futurists.
Pig Farm's mission is to upend popular myths about rural America's heartland. Kotis's script revels in time-worn back-country clichés. The play begins: “Pot-bellied clouds up there today, Tom. Looks like it's gonna rain.” Like the self-contained world of Urinetown, Pig Farm pokes fun at its subject while exploring serious social issues—in this case the environmental consequences of human consumption. Pig Farm suggests that the American way of life has become ecologically unsustainable. “I have a suspicion,” says Kotis, “that one day some bill will come due for living the way we do.” Pig Farm gives voice to that dread—but with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Front & Center talked to Kotis about swine, fecal matter, and other topical topics.
FRONT & CENTER: In your play, the fate of the titular hog farm run by Tom and Tina turns very specifically on the number of pigs they are raising. If the hired hand Tim makes a mistake in his pig count, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has the power to take control of the farm, and Tom and Tina risk losing their livelihood. Is this based on fact?
GREG KOTIS: There's no correspondence between the logic of this play and what real farmers have to deal with in real life. In the logic of the play, they have to know what the pig population is. When the epa comes, the farmer has to give the epa a precise number. The government measures their competency as farmers by this audit. In the world of this play, this is the mechanism by which they test Tom and Tina.
“I was more interested in telling a funny story than portraying the real lives of farmers.”
A farmer once explained to me how auditors used to come from insurance companies to count livestock. When I explained the play to him, he said it sounds like these insurance people who would come, and you would give an accounting of what your stock is to have it insured. Insurance people would then come and check the number of the livestock—but they don't check it for the purposes that are laid out in the plot of my play. This task of the pig count, along with the consequences if you miss the mark, is really a creation of the play.
The plot point in Pig Farm about dumping sludge into the Potomac River is real, though. Farmers do have to file hog waste management plans with the state. How much of your play reflects the real life struggles of pig farmers?
That's a good question. I think it's pretty distant, but the lives of farmers are pretty hard. They are besieged by government demands and regulations about how to run their farms. A couple of years ago, several dairy farmers who attended a reading of the play at the University of Michigan gave me an earful about the regulations they had to function under to run their operations. What stuck me is that these guys didn't find the play funny. I was more interested in telling a funny story than portraying the real lives of farmers.
It should be noted that all the characters in the play (Tom, Tina, Tim, Teddy, and so on) all start with the letter T. That alerts you that Pig Farm is a skewed satire of rural America.
Pig Farm is very much a satire. Not only does it satirize the predicament of where our food comes from, it also sends up mythic portrayals of these heroic American types in films and onstage, like in Sam Shepard's plays. It's more about having fun with our perceptions of how farmers are. The joy of the invention is a big part of it: goofing off, making stuff up, and following those creative impulses.
I'll tell you the inspiration of the play, if it will help. I remember reading newspaper accounts of Hurricane Floyd slamming North Carolina in 1999, and there were accounts of some 100,000 to 110,000 carcasses of pigs and turkeys floating down the river. The flood that deluged North Carolina killed the livestock.
I remember a statistic from a public television report: North Carolina's ten million hogs produce twice as much feces and urine as the populations of Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago combined.
The scale of it is amazing. The confinement farming operations are built along the banks of the river system in eastern North Carolina. When the hurricane happened, the floodwaters rose and flooded the hog operations. Carcasses floated above the gates and flooded down the river. It was a catastrophe of biblical proportions.
Tom has an important monologue at the end of the play. He refers to “the herds getting bigger” and the price of pork going down; to America as “a flooding river, flooding oceans of this world with the sludge of its belly.”
That speech is about how pig farming (and agriculture generally) has evolved, more or less, after World War II, when farming became industrialized. Pig farming has gone from 200 years ago where it was like Charlotte's Web—you had a small number of pigs in the farm that you would slaughter periodically—to today where we have these industrial confinement factory farming operations where you have tens of thousands of animals in crates. Tom's speech is sort of a screed against everything. Tom finds himself being swamped by the demands of what he considers an intrusive government and the pressures of trying to keep his farm together. Those pressures are real. But there's a mythic element, too. It's defiant. He's railing against the world in that last speech—against all those things that are conspiring to keep him from getting his life together.
“This play, I think, is about this dread, which to me is a source of comedy-of gallows humor.”
What exactly did Tom do to deserve all this stuff that you put him through in the play? He's a farmer raising pigs honorably, but he has to depend on a juvenile delinquent for the correct pig count; meanwhile, his wife, who hates the farm, has become sexually demanding.
So you sympathize with Tom? (Laughs) Personally I sympathize with all the characters; I feel like I'm all on their sides. I guess Tom's crime is that which every young man commits who begins to build a family: He makes promises to himself and his wife. He works with all his might to build something secure and that he can believe in—and he can't do it. He feels like he's carrying a load that's too heavy for him—that's his torment. Tina is braver and stronger than Tom; she's calling on Tom to be strong and not fear the task of raising a family. Cowardice is too strong a word, but Tom's sin is his hesitation. Confronted with the demands of starting a family, he blinks. Tina believes in Tom more than Tom believes in Tom. She's clearly frustrated that this man will not live up to his potential or the promises he made to her. She's come to resent the farm. In her mind it's the excuse that Tom uses—he hides behind it. Pig farming is a life she'd walk away from. She'd like Tom to walk away from it too.
Your play creates more than a stink about the politics of pig farming. It feels like an operatic fantasy about how these pig farmers ultimately get away with murder.
(Laughs) The operatic scale of it is grounded in the understanding of how far Tina would go not just to save Tom but to save their marriage, their life, and their world together—to keep Tom from being taken away from her and to have that promise consummated. From their point of view, the government is this sinister menacing presence that has been auditing all of these pig farms one by one. The pressures are becoming impossible. The heat is picking up.
Your analysis is very fair. I don't know that I think about it like that when I'm actually writing it. What makes sense to me is this: Our situation as a people is, I suspect, going to be tougher and tougher, if we believe the scientists (and the evidence seems to be all over the place). This play, I think, is about this dread, which to me is a source of comedy—of gallows humor. The same thing is true in Urinetown. If the scientists of absolute credibility were to come to us, and say, “Here's what you need to do to moderate the impact of the ecological troubles that are going to come about because of population growth and consumption patterns,” we'll probably look at those prescriptions and say, “You know what? We're not going to follow your advice. If we do, that would make life too hard.” In fact, that's exactly what we've done: We're collectively choosing to look the other way. That's the dread percolating below the surface of this play.
I won't call myself an environmentalist though. I am about as passionate about these issues as most people are: We read the newspaper. We feel nervous about it. We stop in the middle of the article because it is too upsetting. Maybe we write a check to Greenpeace or Riverkeepers. The nervousness goes away for a while until we read the next article. The warnings keep coming to us. Pig Farm is a parable. It has its own reality that it is sticking true to. For it to work as a comedy is the first responsibility. It is also written from the point of view that I'm just as helpless as they come, not only because I am an urbanite, but also because I'm involved in the arts—I'd be the first to go, so to speak. That insecurity is why I feel I'm connected to this issue—the world is fragile and very delicate. Pig Farm, like Urinetown, has become a bit of an obsession for me.
Randy Gener, the senior editor of American Theatre magazine, is the author of the plays Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Equal Pieces, among others.
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