I read at least a couple of plays a week, but rarely feel compelled to mention the fact. Naomi Wallace, however, intrigued and repelled me with Slaughter City, a play that claims to be about the gradual erosion of labour rights over the course of the 80s and 90s. On its own, the play is fairly entertaining – most people would describe it as a magical realist representation of conditions in a meatpacking plant somewhere in the American south. I disagree with the label, however, on the grounds that the genre attempts a more thorough interweaving of reality and the surreal than Wallace delivers here. Slaughter City felt more like American Gods, an attempt to make a myth that should exist but doesn’t.

That the play is set in a slaughterhouse, that there are at least a dozen knife fights, and that much of the action takes place while dismembering animals – all these are merely invitations to creative staging. The real difficulty with this play is the challenge Wallace refuses to meet – a challenge she set herself in her introduction – to make this a play about the great struggle of labour from serfdom to Cuba to Thatcher and sweatshops in Myanmar. To make this a play about our broken existence, about how we, every second of our lives, depend upon the violence done to other humans by our system of production.

That is not what Slaughter City is about. Perhaps that’s what it should be about. But I still encourage you to read it, and I still hope for a chance to stage it. Just be aware that you might be happier not reading the introduction.

When it comes to crimes against opera, the East Village Opera Company is fairly low on the list of offenders. Unlike most of the more serious offenders, they don’t wear skimpy clothing, they don’t dump monotonous electro beats on top of piss poor singing and shallow orchestration, and they actually have a musical style of their own. I just wish they’d picked more interesting arias (instead of rearranging Nessun Dorma for the 78th time, for instance). Either that, or that they’d stuck to instrumentals – they open with the overture from Figaro, and never quite rise that high again, possibly because their lead musters up a slightly nasal, straining tenor at best. They’re not half bad, mind you, I just don’t think they’re performing quite up to potential yet.

I imagine Haley Bonar looks at her feet while she sings. She sounds like she belongs at a Passim open mic night, or on a cold subway platform on the elevated M, staring at the stars. She’s quiet and meditative, with a whispery, vulnerable voice that never delivers vulnerable lyrics. She also sings about whisky a great deal. You’ll like her if you like shy, floppy-haired, easily-hurt, navel-gazing boys with guitars. You’ll like her even more if you think they’re wimps. You’ll also like her if you like windswept Midwestern folk (music, not people).