Disco Pigs
Written by Edna Walsh
Directed by John Haidar
Booth Theatre
January 13, 2018
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

What the hell were they saying?  From the moment Disco Pigs began and two captivating young actors pulled apart flaps in the back wall essentially narrating their birth at the same time in the same hospital – you just couldn’t understand what they were saying.  I thought, at first it was because it was an Irish play – set in Cork – and they were just taking this dialect thing a BIT too far.  Then I realized that it was not just the DEEP accent that was standing in my way, they were inventing an entirely new language loosely based on what they saw and heard on radio and TV of the 1980’s.   Here is an example:

“Beat beat through da veins full a drink! Ah pig he wee wee full a drink! Dis is sex in step to dat beautiful soun dat deep down thru me pump da danceflower.”

Now I just gave up trying to understand the dialogue – BUT then I realized that it really wasn’t dialogue; it was more of a poetry that the two had created and if I settled down and allowed the words to become less literal and more musical I could really enjoy the show – and enjoy it I did.  The story is a simple one – a boy and a girl from different families grow up their entire life together, spending every moment together.  They experiment with drinking, dancing, and sex with each other; they become their own entity.  They as they age the outside world comes into this union and pulls and prods at it.

It is just such a wonderful metaphor for co-dependency.  What do you do when you give all of your time to just one person?  And then you add the energy of being 17 and you add some liquor, violence, sex, Baywatch, and disco, disco, disco.  The seventy five minutes you will give this play will leave you high for hours after the curtain.