Kotis' Pig Farm Faces New York Critics

Pig Farm, the comedy that opened at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Laura Pels Theatre on June 27, marks a reunion between two major Urinetown folks: writer Greg Kotis and director John Rando. It also features a cast of two Tony winners Katie Finneran and Denis O'Hare, a Tony nominee John Ellison Conlee and a former cast member of TV's The O.C. Logan Marshall-Green. Did critics feel the comedy was sloppy or slick?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

William Stevenson in his Broadway.com Review: "If the heat and humidity are wearing you down, a trip to the refreshingly silly Pig Farm might be in order… The deliberately inane story starts to wear thin in the second act, but the hog-wild ending is bloody funny nearly as bloody as The Lieutenant of Inishmore but without body parts. Throughout the craziness, the cast hams it up divinely."

Charles Isherwood of The New York Times: "If Mr. Kotis's potboiler does nothing else—and it certainly doesn't do much other than try the patience for two hours—it at least takes back the stage, for a spell, for the violent antics of American-born-and-bred louts and buffoons… Despite the similar trappings, Mr. Kotis's comedy has nowhere near the smarts, the wit or the craft of [Martin] McDonagh's Leenane trilogy. The humor here is of a far more dopey kind, relying on truckloads of mugging and iterations of the unappetizing words 'fecal sludge,' for instance. Powered by the frenzied commitment of the four skilled actors who make up its cast, Pig Farm careers around the stage like an interminable improv session for a still-unformulated sketch on Saturday Night Live."

Frank Scheck of The New York Post: "The best the witless Pig Farm can do is riff on its characters' names, all of which begin with the letter T… The chief joke arises from the characters repeatedly greeting each other by their first alliterative names Tom: 'Tina, Tim' Tina: 'Tom, Tim' , a joke that wears thin long before its many repetitions… Director John Rando, another Urinetown alumnus, fails to bring much imagination to his staging, although the climactic moments, featuring a Grand Guignol-style bloodbath, at least have some liveliness. The actors, apparently not quite sure exactly how to pitch their performances, do what they can, with Finneran particularly impressive as the earthy Tina."

Joe Dziemianowicz of The New York Daily News: "The play is actually more silly than smart, like a recycled sitcom along the lines of Mama's Family or a skit from Saturday Night Live. You know, the kind in which the actors ham it up and address each other in an exaggerated, self-consciously clipped manner. Kotis has pumped up that phoniness by giving all the characters names that start with the letter T… Pig Farm, with its bloated 2 1/2-hour length, wallows far too long under Rando's direction, skidding from sketch comedy to black comedy to anything-for-a-laugh slapstick. Time spent with Tom, Tina, Tim and Teddy can be summed up in one word: Tiresome."

Marilyn Stasio of Variety: "Precision-tooled by helmer John Rando and featuring deliciously demented perfs by ace thesps who aren't afraid to wallow in political paranoia and fecal sludge, bizarre laffer is the dirtiest show in town after The Lieutenant of Inishmore... Having ransacked the national treasury of Western movies and frontier novels for his cultural iconography, Kotis feeds it to the swine in his hilarious plot about the disastrous consequences of the federal government meddling in the affairs of the hard-working pig farmers... Under Rando's scrupulous helming, a cast of brilliant farceurs play these cartoon characters without forgetting that they are, underneath it all, pathetically human."

Peter Santilli of The Associated Press: "This dark, silly comedy is unrelentingly and unapologetically lowbrow. Right down to the bitter, messy end, Kotis is just as content to wallow in his blissfully moronic brand of humor as a pig is to wallow in slop. The talented and funny four-person cast is led by John Ellison Conlee… This low ground is tenuous at best, but Kotis' script is elevated by the effective direction of John Rando and a strong cast that boasts a pair of Tony winners… For those who are not opposed to a little mindless fun, Pig Farm will delight. Although, even the most willing participants might have their endurance tested by some of the same gags and jokes repeated beyond the limits of good sense and spontaneous humor."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "[Pig Farm] is witless, pointless and unrelentingly idiotic. If that sounds like fun—and it clearly did to some theatergoers at a recent preview8212;then the mean-and-stupid have indeed inherited the earth. [Rando and Kotis] appear to be grabbing for a ham-fisted cartoon parody of Sam Shepard's open-road, rural Gothic mythologies, as told by the Three Stooges with a jealous eye toward the splatter-gore, gross-out smarty business of The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Really, even that description is way too kind."