The most stunning drama I’ve seen in months can be presently found at Ybor City’s Silver Meteor Gallery, and if you love art or theater, you’ll hurry over and buy a ticket. The play is Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, the two inspired performers are Dahlia LeGault and Nic Carter, and the subjects are love, friendship, youth, violence, class and loud noise.
Don’t be misled by the title: this Irish play isn’t really about disco (what Americans would call “techno”), except as a kind of paradise sought by the protagonists, and as for pigs, well, our two heroes’ nicknames are “Pig” and “Runt.” Their real names, respectively, are Darren and Sinead, and they were born within moments of each other, have been best friends all through childhood, and are just now enjoying their 17th birthday and all it promises. On Kathy Buck’s deliberately ugly set — mostly a bare stage whose mottled walls are covered with paint splotches and magazine pages — these characters demonstrate their symbiotic relationship while also revealing the forces that are pulling it apart.
The Silver Meteor is just the right space for this downscale spectacle — its slapdash ambience is perfect for characters who themselves are haphazardly put together, and its intimacy allows us to feel the terrible urgency of their rowdy emotional life. Not since Hat Trick Theatre produced Neil LaBute’s Bash here — in 2005 — has this theater been better suited to a play. And seldom has a play here been better directed — Megan Lamasney turns in startlingly powerful work. Think James Joyce and Anthony Burgess meet Quentin Tarantino and The Three Stooges and you might have a sense of what Disco Pigs offers. Or think Spring Awakening on amphetamines.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2011.