Rodney Lee Rogers on HOGS
HOGS is really a tale of three plays. The first is, of course, Ibsen’s AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, which has remained in my consciousness for some reason over the years. I have only seen it performed once, in Los Angeles with the great Ian McKellan. Something of the text stuck. It was much earlier, when I was in college, that the second play HOGS started percolate within my subconscious. Highly affected by my uncle’s research into the corruption and pollution emanating from corporate hog farms in North Carolina, I thought I would civically tackle it the only way I knew how, to write a play. Thus the story of a young lawyer caught between a small town, the hog farms, and the the devil dressed in overalls emerged. I always liked the story, but it never found its way, until years later when something of the overlay seemed to crash into Ibsen’s AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE while viewing the third play, DOLLHOUSE by Rebecca Gilman. What Gilman did with Ibsen’s A DOLL’S HOUSE was extraordinarily thrilling. Gilman found away to update the story and at every turn create a cleverness that made everything new. John Osborne Hughes, my acting mentor, describes the truth as fresh but familiar as if you had heard it before. This was DOLLHOUSE for me, and shortly afterwards the direction seemed clear and HOGS was reborn over the structure of one of our greatest plays.
Ibsen is known as the father of modern realism. At PURE’s core is a devotion to realism and the working of human psychology, even while thrusting forward in wildly imaginative directions. While adapting, I found that the depths of realism of the play could not be denied. If you tried to work your way off too far into inventiveness, the text seemed to warn you that such an attempt would lead to disaster. What realism affords, especially in a play repositioned in the New South, is a depth and introduction to characters far away from the Old South of Tennessee Williams. Characters willing themselves out of a culture that has been forever stamped by the beauty of the old Southern way. Here we have intrusions by all manner of technological devices pumping information into a small town from all over the world. These characters embrace these changes and incorporate the ideas into their way of life and their means of survival. The budding newspapers and pamphlets of Ibsen’s play easily become the blogs and websites of today. The electronic media plays a vital role in HOGS, for it is in the same unfettered spirit of the independent press movement. At the core of it all is human nature and its struggle with our base needs: greed, gluttony, and desire for a compassionate sustainability for our lives and culture.
The fictional Barrington Resort and Spa substitutes for the Baths of Ibsen’s play. The idea is the same. A tourist attraction that will attract people from all over the world. It is a lifeline for a small town in crisis and mirrors the challenges that our state faces in repositioning in this great reset of the economy. The source of the pollution, the tannery, is replaced by hog farms. The potential ecological disaster that Hurricane Floyd summoned with over 150,000 hogs drowned and scattered in the waterways, not to mention the tons of pollutants the waste lagoons pumped into the system, is terrifying. Though our state had done well in keeping these farms controlled, our neighbor to the north has slowly, over time, raised the number of pigs to up to ten million. The unfortunate truth is that the water runs south.
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE is quintessentially the play of a doctor faced with the choice of prosperity for his town or the hard reality of keeping the fragile ecosystem sustainable for future generations. It is one of the great works that endure through time, for the message is ingrained in our collective subconscious. One need only scan the newspaper (in print or online) to find scores of similar personal crises that are won or lost every day. It has been an honor and great learning experience to transport that play to a time and place that is more immediate to our understanding. Hopefully, the core ideals of the play remain and continue to provoke thought, discovery, and conversation about the nature of what we truly are and the battle each of us must wage against our own self-interest and desire.
