After a slow start, Hannah Doran’s drama about small-time tragedy among immigrant Americans in the age of Trump finds its feet in an explosive second half.
It’s set in Cafarelli & Sons, an NYC butcher’s shop that’s been in the family of owner Paula (Jackie Clune) for decades. She’s a badass with a heart of gold and has a benign tendency to hire staff with criminal records who other employers wouldn’t touch. Business is struggling, though, and only one of staff members JD (Marcello Cruz) and Billy (Ash Hunter) will be hired permanently at the end of the summer.
There’s a lot of leisurely preamble before the story kicks in - I couldn’t shake off the sense that in this debut play, Anglo-Irish writer Hannah Doran felt like she had to compensate for her distance from this world by overly setting the scene, taking too much time to introduce her five characters. There is also a distracting initial similarity to Lynn Nottage superlative Clyde’s (about ex prisoners working in a sandwich shop).
Finally, though, we get down to it. JD is enthusiastic about the job and a shoo in for the role, but is deeply nervous about getting it. Billy has been bumming around the shop for years without getting taken on permanently - but he needs the money to look after his desperately ill mother. Caught between them is T (Mithra Malek), Billy’s cousin, a young woman who has served time and is now working a temporary summer role at the shop. JD takes a shine to her; Billy leans on her to help him sabotage his rival’s chances; T is torn.
When Doran’s drama kicks into gear, it becomes a taut thriller that’s also an ode to America’s open-heartedness and immigrant-based spirit; and also its rapacious, mercenary, every-man-for-himself attitude and the enabling of its worst instincts in the present era. It’s not just about Billy trying to shaft JD – it’s about why the two of them are so desperate, and if there are lines that can’t be crossed. Considering Doran overexplains stuff early on, there is a particularly brilliant twist in the play where a character does something terrible and momentous and the play never explains it. The audience is trusted to fill in the blanks. And I’d say Doran – and director George Turvey – are right to trust us, because I think turning the character into a speechifying villain would kill the action dead.
There’s also a solid cast and a cute set from Mona Camille, which puts pvc butcher’s curtains on all the theatre doors and makes use of a series of joints of some sort of convincing-ish synthetic meat for the copious scenes of actual butchery. It’s a solid play that grows in stature - when I caught up with on a sleepy matinee the audience was largely unresponsive for the first half; in the second there was gasp after gasp.
