Slaughter City
by Naomi Wallace

“It’s not just the blood-spattered slaughterhouse setting that makes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s SLAUGHTER CITY an unusually meaty (you’ll forgive the expression) new play.

Aligning issues of class and race and labor dynamics to a surrealist aesthetic as elusive as her politics are straightforward, American writer Naomi Wallace shows a willingness to embrace topics once treated by the likes of Clifford Odets and Sophie Treadwell.

These days, such terrain is left to the movies—Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, among others—but the pulse of Wallace’s writing is of and for the theater.

Hers may not be the most audience-friendly of voices, but even her opacity commands attention.”Matt Wolf, Variety “Naomi Wallace’s SLAUGHTER CITY, which gets its premiere in The Pit, is a strange and compelling play that unties two elements in the American tradition—the radical and the mystic.

If it reminds me of anyone it is the Walt Whitman who wrote of ‘the audacity of freedom’ and the need for America to free itself from the anti-democratic European past.

On the radical level, the play is a passionate protest against exploitation… …the play has passion, poetry and a wild strangeness.

Wallace also writes highly effective individual scenes… Most cheering of all is Wallace’s adventurous attempt to redefine political drama in terms of a feminist surrealism.”Michael Billington, The Guardian