Fringe 2015: ‘Slaughter/ette’ by Butter & Serve

I kicked things off with Butter & Serve Theatre Company, founded a little over a year ago by graduates of the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training. As per the last few years of Pig Iron Fringe shows, these graduates seem to have imbibed the “devised theatre” doctrine of an “experience” versus a show — i.e., we’re not peeling back those social and cultural truths unless we’re herding the audience around a big building, making them wear or carry odd things, and possibly embracing them in the course of the show, instead of seating them in front of a stage. Thus we come to Slaughter/ette, a bold, thoughtful, and funny mash-up of The Bachelor and similar “reality” TV shows, and a slaughterhouse full of glammed-out women (“the merchandise”) instead of animals.

Riffing on ‘the craziest show ever’

Butter & Serve launched in May 2014 with cofounders Alicia Crosby, Vanita Kalra, Riva Rubenoff, and Sara Vanasse. The company “relies on sensory experience, movement, and non-linear storytelling to challenge theatrical norms and explore themes close to our own lives,” according to the blurb they wrote for the Festival program.

Slaughter/ette director Rubenoff, a Boston native, got her bachelor’s in directing and design from Muhlenberg in 2013 before training with Pig Iron. “We came up with the idea as a little bit of a joke,” she told BSR after opening night on September 3. Until last year, she had never even watched The Bachelor, but at the time, caught a bit of an episode with a friend, and thought it was “the craziest show ever.”

Watching those TV tropes of womanhood competing for a man — like the virgin, the desperately aspiring homemaker, or “the eroticized woman of color [who] is only loved for her otherness” — sparked the idea among Rubenoff and her cohorts of comparing the Bachelorette formula to a slaughterhouse.

“We laughed about it, and then we really did it,” Rubenoff said.

From rose ceremonies to ridiculous contests and a picnic dinner date, plus plenty of audience interaction, the show skewered this reality TV format as it sent its audience-designated rejects into a cube of plastic sheeting for a screaming, blood-soaked finish.

The show’s arena at the Mascher Space Cooperative was an unnerving mix of faux candles and rose petals and plastic cups of white and blush wine, plus ingenious 3-D paper pig carcasses hanging from noisy chains. A lisping proprietor named Samuel Samsonite ushered walking theatergoers around the space for the hour-long show, which began with everyone trooping in groups up a steep old stairway and cramming along one wall for long minutes behind a plastic curtain.

No seats here

Given the company’s Pig Iron roots and past Fringe shows like Pay Up and 2014’s 99 Breakups, which carried audiences through the PAFA museum for a series of vignettes, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by Slaughter/ette’s format. After all, it is all about pushing “theatrical norms.” But can challenging those conventions, especially without explicit notice to the ticket-buyer, result in theater that isn’t as accessible as it ought to be?

The Festival catalogue has some shows listed as “wheelchair accessible,” but as in Slaughter/ette, you really can’t tell from the catalogue which pieces go in the opposite direction: Not only was this totally inaccessible to someone who can’t climb stairs, but there also wasn’t any seating at all.

I wouldn’t have batted an eye a few years ago, but after hip surgery for a major joint injury and the damage of a chronic illness earlier this year, I’m realizing for the first time just how many stairs, curbs, and uneven sidewalks the world has. I may look like a healthy young woman, but my mobility is still seriously impaired, and I operate daily in a high degree of pain. Getting on the subway to catch a show is hard enough for me these days, but walking up to the venue to find out that you won’t be able to sit at all for the duration of the show gives serious pause (and I’m relatively mobile now, compared to someone confined to a wheelchair, crutches, or other assistive device).

Fortunately, halfway through the performance, Rubenoff was kind enough to offer me a folding chair that happened to be leaning on the wall. But I wouldn’t have been able to make it through the show otherwise — and there are several other Fringe pieces this year that sound interesting to me, but that I crossed off my list because I worry they’ll be too physically demanding. How many other theater-lovers peruse the catalogue with the same worry, especially as “devised theater” creators put the audience through more and more hoops in the name of pushing the artistic envelope?

It’s great to see theater moving in new directions with energetic young artists, changing the norms of spatial configuration and audience participation. I just hope that somehow these shows don’t become a privilege only for those who are healthy enough to follow the actors around. At the very least, listings should make the nature of the show clear, so that those whose bodies can’t handle the action are able to make another choice.

Our Naomi Orwin wrote on the most recent season of The Bachelorette here.