bringing Naomi Wallace's SLAUGHTER CITY to new york
an interview with Small Boat artistic director Ben Natan
This morning, Small Boat Productions announced that they will present the New York premiere of Naomi Wallace’s Slaughter City. The 1993 play, about pack house workers fighting for their lives, originally premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. I spoke to artistic director Ben Natan about the exciting new production, about making workers’ rights a storytelling priority, and about all of the wonderful artists Small Boat has assembled for their biggest show yet.
I worked with several Small Boat artists (including Ben, Slaughter City director Reuven Glezer, and frequent collaborators Arin Edelstein and McLean Peterson) on the first New York reading of my play, PLEASE LAUGH, in January of 2023, and, as a personal aside, I must say that you’d be foolish to miss all they have cooking. These are thoughtful, intelligent, talented artists who make every process smooth sailing. I couldn’t be more excited to support them in this new endeavor.
I'm so excited that you are working with Naomi Wallace. How did that come to pass?
After Waiting For Lefty wrapped up, I was immediately looking toward what I wanted to do for the next piece. It was really important to build on this tradition of speaking truth to power through the theatre, something that I really feel strongly about as it comes to Small Boat. And Reuven Glezer, who you know1, is a long time collaborator of mine. They brought a bunch of different plays to me that he was really interested in producing, and we sort of went through them and did some readings and came upon Slaughter City. I was like, this is the perfect development on Waiting for Lefty, for Small Boat to do another play about the realities of working class life in the United States. Now, 32 years after it was written, we can bring it into our contemporary conversation, and say, okay, what's changed? What hasn't? What conversations are we still having? What are the dialectics that have developed over the last three decades?
I reached out to Naomi and she was really enthusiastic about the prospect of us doing this show in New York. It's a show that means a lot to her. It's really a privilege to bring a piece by somebody whose work I respect so much to New York City for the first time, and have her involvement at the level that it's been. She’s had conversations with our director, she’s had conversations with the sound designer. She’s taken a really special interest in the show, which is so cool.
It’s interesting to do another show about workers’ rights that exists further along the historical timeline than Waiting For Lefty. How is Slaughter City handling workers’ rights differently than its predecessors?
The Group Theater and Clifford Odets and Waiting for Lefty were ahead of their time in a lot of ways in confronting the realities of capitalism in America. One of the shortcomings of The Group and of the analysis in the show, in my opinion, was the heterogeneity of the company, for lack of a better term. You had this group of white, first or second generation Jewish Americans. At the time, their place in society was far more precarious than the place of Jewish Americans in American society today, and there is distance between them, and this vague, immutable concept of whiteness. Looking back on those pieces, it’s a little bit harder to understand the ways the Jewish and Irish and Italian characters in these plays lived outside of the hegemony of WASP America. Slaughter City does a lot more to interrogate the way that race interacts with working class struggle and stratification. There are white characters on the factory floor who have a very specific feeling of alienation and disenfranchisement, and it's sort of weighed against the way that the Black characters in the show and the Black characters who are on the factory floor with them also feel that alienation and that disenfranchisement. Putting those two things in conversation with each other is something that Waiting For Lefty wasn’t able to do.
I know that Small Boat recently held auditions to meet a larger, more diverse group of actors. Can you talk about that process?
A big thing for me in the formation and the journey of Small Boat has been the acknowledgement that downtown theatre in New York City has become very splintered, very siloed off, very cliquey. Whatever you want to call it, it's become this cohort of people who might have gone to a graduate program together, or a studio program together, and they're all working together, making work for their friends to come and see. And, that's fun, and it's comfy and it's cozy. Who doesn't like making art with your friends? My philosophy around that is, well, let's make more friends.
It's been really important to me to cast a much wider net. Art is ultimately at its best when it's for the people, and when it's made accessible to as many people as possible. And I think that there's a much better cultural exchange in a bigger artistic community than if we were just, you know — I'm saying this as a person who went to NYU — we were just a bunch of kids who went to NYU together, making art together as a bunch of kids who went to NYU together. That's sort of boring. The art is better when more people are involved, and the art is better when we are bringing in people from different parts of the country, from different ethnic and national and racial and gendered backgrounds. It's going to make the art better. It's going to make the quality of stories that we can tell a lot better.
What excites you most about the artistry of the play?
It is very contemporary and grounded and realistic. The stakes of the play feel very real and very close to home, and yet the language is so poetic. And there are moments that detach from reality.
Everything starts with Shakespeare for me, because that was my training as an actor. Shakespeare only wrote about the most important days of people's lives; to speak poetically is when our emotions transcend everyday speech. Think about the times that you've been betrayed. Think about the times that you are in love, or there has been great loss in your life. You don't speak normally. You speak with poetry. And reading this play, I think about the exceptional circumstances that these characters are being put under, and the pressure, the alienation, the disenfranchisement, the oppression, and what that forces them to do in terms of how they communicate with each other and how they express themselves. If we engage poetry, this really heightened speech, it's far more true to the human experience than naturalism. It’s hitting you exactly where it hurts.
Give me the elevator pitch for the show.
It's 1993 on the factory floor of a Kentucky meat packing and sausage factory. And things start getting weird quickly.
Tell me about some of the artists that you're working with.
This is the first time that I've been able to collaborate with Reuven in a producer/director relationship. I've done shows with Reuven where I've been an actor and he's directed. I've done shows where they were the writer and I was an actor. So we've collaborated for a really long time, and this is different. And I'm really excited to be working with Reuven, because that's somebody who has an incredible encyclopedic brain when it comes to theatre and style, and the history of the art, and their own opinions about the craft and the form. It’s invigorating to hear Reuven talk about all of those things and hear how clear their vision is
The bigness and abstractness of Slaughter City could be really daunting to a lot of directors. Reuven has taken the challenge head on and has been really fearless in their approach to it, which is really thrilling to see, and makes me feel even more excited about the piece.
Maya Jeyam is assistant directing. Maya is somebody that I've had a close relationship with for a long time. We met acting together back in 2021 and we've continued to collaborate with each other. The thing I've always loved about Maya is that if they are an actor in a production, they're always going to be the first actor at table work to ask a question or make an observation that is so cutting and incisive that it gives everybody else permission in the room to speak their own questions and ideas. They're the intellectual backbone of Small Boat.
In the cast, we have Owen Laheen, who is a really wonderful actor. They just came here from Ireland, and they’ve been doing exceptional work in New York City. They’re just somebody that I've admired from afar for a really long time, and I’m geeked out to have them in the room and be collaborating with them.
In Waiting For Lefty, the cast was very young. The oldest actor in the cast might have been 35 or maybe 36. Having a young cast is exciting in promoting the careers of early-stage artists, which is a big thing for for Small Boat, but also it’s acknowledging that early career does not necessarily mean young. There is age diversity in the character arrangement of this show, and we were really wanting to pursue age diversity in the cast. I'm really excited to bring in Gil Charleston and Alan Simon, who are older actors and people that I admire. It definitely all follows with this philosophy of bringing everybody into the fold. Theatre is for everybody.
There’s someone like AJ Liu, who's associate producing this project. AJ was a computer science major at Carnegie Mellon, and less than a year ago was like, I want to do theatre. I was like, this is kind of badass, let’s get you in. AJ has sang in one of our music nights, AJ has stage managed one of our readings. And they’re so hungry to do anything as it relates to theatre. I was like, you want to try producing? And she was like, absolutely. There is no stage in the process of somebody wanting to work in theatre that I wouldn’t want them to be a part of Small Boat.
Anything else you want to plug about the production?
So much is going to be happening leading up to the opening of Slaughter City. We have all this programming happening this summer in order to help fundraise for the show. But more importantly, I want to emphasize how important community is to this company, how important bringing in new people is to this company, and sharing with people not just this artistic vision, but this very romantic vision of a better world, and knowing that our role as artists is to make that better world seem possible.
Small Boat Productions launched onto the scene last summer with a nearly sold out revival of Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty at the Flea. Tickets for Slaughter City go on sale this summer.
also, you should get tickets for Henry Hicks, Attorney at Cowboy Law at Frigid New York! it was written by my brilliant partner, Jack McManus, and directed by my brilliant collaborator, Alex Church-Gonzales. the cast includes John Gnazzo, Chance Riley Kester, Karen Marulanda, Michael Ortiz, who are all brilliant, as well as my brilliant roommate/collaborator Sarah Alice Shull. it is an incredibly funny, silly, and heartfelt piece that i’ve loved from the moment i read it. don’t miss it!!!
Reuven has actually directed three of my plays!