Pig Iron's "Welcome to Yuba City!' At Live Arts Festival (2nd review)

Perhaps the subtlest charm of Samuel C. Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering lies in his book's ability to make familiar the strange world of that badly dressed, socially backward, basement-laboratory dwelling group known as engineers. After reading his book, I could both sympathize and appreciate these men (as well as a few women) who spend hours squirreled away under fluorescent lights grappling with seemingly obscure problems of circuitry and mechanics, and who consider the invention of the transistor a more defining moment in human history than the printing press.

Some plays can achieve a similar effect of familiarizing what was once alien— Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man counts as an extreme example— while delving beneath extraordinary surface differences to find the common humanity that undergirds someone's remote experience.

Pig Iron's Welcome to Yuba City! is not such a play. Instead, it pokes fun at exaggerated stereotypes through characters that invite derisive laughter.

Under the hood

Yuba City is more of a museum exhibit than a show— a tableau vivant set in a northern California truck-stop populated by a scoliosis-suffering cowgirl (Charlotte Ford), cowboys picking at their teeth with an arrowhead (Geoff Sobelle and Dito Van Reigersberg), a mullet-sporting girl in leopard print pants enforcing a restraining order (Ford), and a disheveled UFO seeker (Alex Torra) who's encumbered by a lisp as well as his sensing equipment. The play even spoofs the tourists who prey on the West, from Sarah Sanford's doe-eyed girl in a sun dress who sings "Wow, Yuba City" each time she appears, to the trio of Italian cyclists pedaling, bickering and kissing their way through the mountainous terrain.

The characters enter Mimi Len's hyper-realistic set swinging on ropes, emerging from under the hood of a truck, or pushing a broken-down Ford. Dressed in trucker caps and burger-boy shirts, they sing along to the radio in spontaneous unison (with original songs by Michael Friedman), and speak in Forrest Gump-isms ("Life out here is like a bar of soap").

Patterns of speech

The members of Pig Iron's ensemble demarcate their characterizations with differentiations in gait and gesture, patterns of speech and accent, and wigs and vivid costumes that are upstaged only by the incredibly dexterous characterizations that inhabit them. I doubt that I'll see better performances on my Live Arts Festival schedule.

Christina Zani contributes sharp choreography (her dance of the G-men was particularly inspired), and the phenomenal physical comedy only accentuates the humor of the jokes and exaggerated characterizations. I (and the audience) laughed heartedly throughout. I couldn't help it: It's probably the funniest show of this year's Live Arts Festival.

Gold amid the sludge

But I wanted more than a show that mostly invites audience members to sneer through their laughter at these hicks and the Western mythology that informs their lives (Yuba City, one of the truck-stop patrons tell us, was founded by a trucker named Jimmy when he ran out of gas). The rare moments of subtle homage to these denizens of a former mining town shine through like the flecks of gold found by a miner sifting through pans filled with sludge.

In other moments, Pig Iron spoofs the stereotypes that make the jokes funny (the Asian matriarch who owns the restaurant buries gold in the dirt under the counter; the Native American magically spins a tumbleweed into a blanket). And I'm sure that everyone got the heavy-handed discussions of reality vs. illusion, and how we should act when we encounter alien life.

Sympathy for hicks

Rather than expose the myths of Americana, Yuba City just takes potshots. By contrast, even Shakespeare's villain Shylock got more sympathetic treatment.

Why would an inventive company like Pig Iron waste its talents taking easy potshots at hicks? Even people who take pleasure in NASCAR races and spitting contests share some wellspring of humanity with, say, avant garde audiences at the Live Arts/Fringe Festival. Insulting yokels merely insults the derider. So what, then, does Welcome to Yuba City! say about Pig Iron? ♦


To read another review by Jonathan M. Stein, click here.