Photo by Matthew Yoder
Dead Canary Theatre is St. Pete’s newest theatre company, promising to produce plays that will get you thinking, and talking. Fat Pig is their second outing in the intimate Studio@620, continuing a season focused on power dynamics. And it will give you a lot to talk about.
Fat Pig by Neil LaBute premiered on Broadway in 2004. The play begins with a chance meeting between Tom and Helen and follows the extenuating factors that challenge what should just be kismet.
Dead Canary Theatre’s Fat Pig
The ’90s and early aughts were a truly unhinged period of unrealistic beauty expectations. I know: I lived it. At the time, it was ground-breaking to see it-boy Jeremy Piven’s Tom falling in love, and getting physical with a fat actress. Not a starlet in a fat suit (thanks, Shallow Hal and Friends), a real, actual fat person.
Years ago, I adopted the use of “fat” to describe my body, with the innocuousness of a Dr. Seuss adjective. It indicates “the opposite of thin.” It does not come with judgment. That is the context in which I refer to the character of Helen as a fat woman. Helen likes herself and is comfortable in her skin. Part of her lived experience, however, is dealing with people who don’t know how to reconcile a fat person not actively trying to change themselves.
LaBute deliberately makes Helen the most likable, three-dimensional, irreproachable character in the play. She is smart, funny, interesting, mature, and yes, even attractive.
She just happens to be fat.
But keep in mind: this is not Helen’s play. She is only in two scenes per act. This is Tom’s play, who essentially never leaves the stage. This is not a play about a fat woman’s genuine lived experience; it is a play written by a man about a man working through the societal expectations he has internalized and navigating his authentic path. And I think that is an important part of the conversations you have after seeing the play: what makes a man, any man, regardless of status or perceived attractiveness, judge and jury of women’s bodies and their subsequent overall worth?
And with the perspective in mind that this is Tom’s play: revisit the title.
[Read more]
Arts All Around!
The Gabber Newspaper covers live theater and art across South Pinellas. And, when we find something worth the drive, we cover art in the Tampa Bay and Sarasota areas.
Photo by Matthew Yoder
Directed by Dead Canary co-founder and Artistic Director Stephen Riordan, Fat Pig features Andrew Deeb as Tom and Christie Keller as Helen. With excellent chemistry and innate likability, it is easy to root for them. Domenic Bisesti and Jennifer Lauriello play Tom’s coworkers, two characters so insipid and unlikable, the actors were compelled to assure audience members in their program bios that they are not really like that.
I am very familiar with this play. I am also very familiar with the lived experience of a fat woman, in the entertainment industry and in real life. Along with that, I was curious to see how this play and its premise would resonate 21 years later, but I’m not a blank slate. So, I went to see the show with someone who wasn’t even born when it premiered: my very Gen Z daughter.
After the show, she and I talked as much about the audience reactions and theatrical devices as we did the substance of the play.
The scene shifts were masked by montages of weight loss commercials over the decades, which got us talking about the inherited generational trauma of weight and beauty expectations. When the characters used deeply offensive slurs to describe fatness, the audience was silent. The laughs came at the expense of the characters’ self-awareness, which was incredibly refreshing. And of course, the ending, which came as a surprise to my daughter so I will not spoil it for you either, was the real conversational catalyst.
For me, that’s what theatre does best, and why engaging with it right now is more vital than ever. Sit in a dark room with friends and strangers, go on a journey, and talk about it. Dead Canary is producing the kind of theatre that invites you to feel uncomfortable feelings — about yourself, about your preconceptions — and follow up those feelings with an exploration of the why. Through that exploration is the potential to affect change.
See Fat Pig Produced by Dead Canary Theatre Company
Studio@620, 620 1st Ave. S., St. Petersburg. Through Sept. 28. $25-45. Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; and Sun., 3 p.m. thestudioat620.org, 727-895-6620.
We’re the calm during the storm. No hype, only help!
Bookmark The Gabber Newspaper‘s storm coverage page for quick access to relevant tropical storm updates. No hype, no guessing, just updates on shelters, sandbags, and closures. Sign up for text alerts to get real-time guidance and prep advice when there’s a named storm heading our way. Also, check out our downtown Gulfport and beach web cams.
