Raw Bacon from Poland
by Christina Masciotti

For shoe salesman and aspiring personal trainer Dennis Toledo, a lifetime of trouble assumes a new intensity after a bad tour in Iraq.“Let fly with the virtual confetti, please.

RAW BACON FROM POLAND [is a] poignant new drama … The writer…is Christina Masciotti, a downtown dramatist of rigorous personal style whose following includes a lot of theatergoers who consider Broadway a wasteland … Ms Masciotti’s distinctively awkward dialogue has never sounded more organic, or more revelatory of character.

Ms Masciotti (VISION DISTURBANCE, SOCIAL SECURITY) has an ear for the quirks and imperfections of everyday speech.

This means that her characters often talk in winding syntax replete with malapropisms that would dismay Strunk and White … RAW BACON charts the steps in Dennis’s coming to terms with his wartime experiences.

It is, in some ways, a conventional `recovery’ narrative of the sort found in many an inspirational memoir and movie.

But Ms Masciotti’s brand of sentimentality has a rough honesty that often transforms the formulaic … But like many experimental playwrights of her generation (including her mentor, the downtown giant Richard Maxwell), Ms Masciotti deliberately embraces clichés, and finds exotic and individual truths in their use and distortion … Ms Masciotti’s script allows for aria-like moments from each member of the cast … But it is the language of combustible Dennis that truly lights up the ashen world in which the play is set …” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times