Sarah Marshall as Big Hog in Civilization (all you can eat) at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. (Photo by Stan Barouh via Woolly Mammoth)
Stop the buffet, I’m full.
In Jason Grote’s Civilization (all you can eat), premiering this month at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (after a three-show festival run last summer in New York), U.S. society is boiled down into a bunch of gluttonous, frenzied, sexually frustrated consumers. In other words, just about normal.
Oh, and there’s a talking pig. Big Hog, as the swine played by Sarah Marshall calls himself, is both protagonist and disjunctive Greek chorus. “Big Hog knows all. Big Hog will see the wide world.” Big Hog will ramble through the show’s slaughterhouse opener in which a white-coated butcher (JaBen Early) offs three less-fortunate piggies. Being turned into bacon is a far better fate than what ensues.
From there, Grote serves up a loose patchwork of sketches depicting the lives of—as the playbill describes—”six ambitious Americans on a quest for success at the dawn of the Obama age.” It’s September 2008—Sarah Palin! Lehman Brothers! Hope and change! And just how much ambition is being tossed about? Perhaps in the closest match to the Barack Obama experience, these six characters are more aspirational than ambitious.
The first of these scenes, a perceived confrontation between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that is revealed to be a ribald ad campaign for Twix, is a clever gag, but from there Grote’s script turns maudlin. David (Daniel Escobar), the actor playing Washington, is quick to descend into self-pity; his friend Zoe (Tia James), who’s directing the Twix spot, isn’t much better.
The allusion is simple enough—two artistic-types wishing they were on to bigger and better things like arthouse movies with serious content whoring themselves out to Big Candy. Oh, the audacity.
And, oh, the hope. Zoe’s husband, Mike (Sean Meehan), a chaos theorist cast off by academia, is trying to make a go of it in the self-help realm, fixing to rebrand his metaphysics book into something resembling The Secret. His sister, Carol (Naomi Jacobson), meanwhile, is drowning in a sea of subprime mortgages and Obama conspiracy theory emails. And how is Carol’s daughter, Jade (Casie Platt), trying to cash in? Amateur porn. Because, you know, corporations will make whores of us all.
Hey, I’m not crazy about Big Oil or Big Pharma or Big Whatever, but as Big Hog roams the countryside, evolving into something ever greedier and ever more corpulent, it feels like Grote is beating us senseless with Big Allegory. The one-hour-45-minute Civilization takes no breaks, and you’ll feel the slog. The only interludes are spaced-out dance moves the actors employ when entering the stage. Woolly’s artistic director Howard Shalwitz makes these cutscenes as enjoyably trippy as possible, but this show, presumably, isn’t about the periodic experimental dance routines.
Perhaps personal greed and corporate appetites will consume us all some day. But so what if Big Hog knows this? We’ve already given up so much of ourselves to social networks, retail mailing lists, cheap advertisements and other product-driven nonsense all while feeding ourselves some overcooked drivel about moving into a new era of post-partisan, post-racial bliss. If that’s what Grote’s getting at, he’s on point, and on the same wavelength as the Occupy Wall Street movement, yet managing to make less sense than the leaderless and demand-free income-inequality protest. I saw a clearer message painted on the side of the so-called “tent of dreams.”
Maybe we were all a bunch of narcissistic, self-involved consumers back in 2008. Is it any different today? If anything, it feels a bit worse. Banks are consolidated, the housing market is still in throes, shitty television commercials are as abundant as ever and more and more we broadcast our lives on multiple Internet platforms. Has Big Hog emerged only in the past four years? No, he’s only gotten bigger, and Civilization (all you can eat) is just a train wreck of forced metaphors.
But the point is taken. Big Hog will eat us, if we haven’t already finished ourselves off. After all, people are corporations, too, my friend.
By Jason Grote, directed by Howard Shalwitz. About 1 hour 45 minutes. Through March 11 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D Street NW. Tickets available at wollymammoth.net or at (202) 393-3939.
