Some time before she wrote the luscious, beauty- and melancholy-streaked gem Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Naomi Wallace penned a long, scabrous fantasia on the age-old themes of labor and race, called Slaughter City. This is a difficult play on paper, unlike Trestle, which unfolds like a dream of a seraph. Slaughter City has a good measure of clumsy phrasing, awkward transitions, heavy-handed symbolism, and too-convenient politicking; but it's an intriguing grotesque thing with quite a few unfamiliar character relationships.

So when I heard someone was doing a production, down on Eddy St., I just had to drop in. The production company was the aptly-named Crowded Fire Theatre (You know, don't you, that the definition of terrorism is to shout "theatre" in a crowded fire), and there was a certain amount of fire in this production, and definitely a crowd.

The company did a rather good job of making concrete such a difficult text: lots of the situations that I had read as unmotivated dialogue became conceivable social situations with roots in the roles of the characters. Crowded Fire is to be commended for that. The players didn't quite connect with each other in some of the more intense scenes, and if a defense is to be made on the lines of "It's Brechtian, you're supposed to be alienated, not believe it" (a weak and saucy defense in any event), then I'm not ready to buy it. The texture of the performance could have been hauntingly disaffected (and it was, in some of the early meat-slicing scenes) but instead many of the moments where contact with the unknown could have been made, were simply dropped and an emotion was telegraphed.

I'm glad I saw it, and I'd see another Crowded Fire Theatre production, but one feature of this show really drove me nuts. There's a great line in the play about how you can't let someone else sharpen your knife—"They'll fold your edge," says Brandon—but the actors themselves don't know how to sharpen a knife. They're constantly dragging the blade backward across the steel (good) and then pushing it straight forward into the steel, without even distributing the pressure over the length of the blade. Fold your edge, indeed!