“Customers buy from us because we LIE to them all day long!” declares the boss of Meat Men wholesale meat sellers. His business staff consists of a nymphet secretary and two drivers—one of them a die-hard *** and the other afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome—with barely three brain cells to their collective name. But they know there’s big money to be made peddling steaks door-to-door from the back of a truck. And if the actual product isn’t quite all they claim, and if the consumers occasionally fall prey to food poisoning—well, caveat emptor! And if a few towns must be axed from the territory (the police have been alerted, you see), doesn’t that still leave a wealth of suckers whose gullibility justifies the gulling?
David Mamet fans will quickly recognize in this line-up The Hustler, The Sidekick, The Broad and The Mark, and will note the curious absence of The Weasel—meaning that the task of saving the day falls, not to the smartest, but to the least stupid. The trickier assignment, however, is persuading an audience to dwell for two hours in a universe sordid enough to make Killer Joe look like Mamma Mia. It is easy to envision self-conscious young actors playing this uncomfortable material as broad farce or worse, serious melodrama, but if we are allowed to feel an instant of compassion for these lowlifes—whose cowflesh may be inferior, but who corner the market in manure—their actions will suddenly assume moral significance and be rendered intolerably repugnant.
Fortunately, neither playwright Ben Byer nor director Dado are strangers to dramatic depiction of the good, bad or ugly. (Between them is a resumé that includes productions with virtually every up-against-the-wall theater company in town.) The rhythm and tempo of a salesman’s spiel is designed to lull the listener’s attention away from its content. To this end, Frank Dominelli, Matt Scharff, Erik Johnson and Shannon O’Neill immerse themselves in their amoral characters, spewing forth machine-gun dialogue at a pace too swift to allow us time to be offended by its vulgarity. The result is a roller-coaster ride that retains its control over us right up to its big, noisy, trash-the-stage finale.