Plot synopsis
Fat Pig
tells us the story of Tom, a thirty-something, in shape, stereotypical professional in a large city, who falls for a very plus-size librarian named Helen. They meet in a crowded cafeteria at lunchtime and get to talking. Tom is taken with her brash acceptance of the way people see her and her honesty. He asks her for her number and they start to date. A couple weeks Carter, Tom’s best friend, starts to notice the signs of Tom having a new girlfriend. He obnoxiously pesters him for information about the new girl and in order to get it mentions it in front of a woman from accounting, Jeannie, who has been seeing Tom on-and-off for a while. She gets very upset which gets Tom to admit that he is “sort of” seeing her. Carter asks Tom what he is doing that night, and Tom says he is busy. Carter knows then that he is meeting Helen at a restaurant Tom frequents, Tom denies it and says it is a business dinner with people from the Chicago branch of their firm. Carter, not believing him, stops by the restaurant and sees them together. He approaches them and introduces himself to Helen, and she excuses herself to go to the restroom. While she is gone Carter thoroughly insults her weight and calling her a lot of horrible things, not knowing that this is Tom’s new girlfriend. He assumes then that Tom was telling the truth about the people coming in from Chicago, since he thought that Tom would never date anyone that “fat”.
Later that week Jeannie pays a visit to Tom in his office. She has found out that no people from Chicago came to visit. She demands to know what is going on with him and her and he says that he is not interested and will never be again. Earlier, she and Carter had been gossiping about the “fat cow from Chicago,” which is how Jeannie found out about the whole thing. So once Tom says that it wasn’t a business dinner, she flips out and smacks him, hurt that he would pick someone like Helen over her. Carter looks on and sort of apologizes for being rude about Helen, saying that he didn’t know she was his girlfriend. He asks to see a picture and after a lot of pestering gets one from Tom. He then proceeds to run down the hall and show everyone. Throughout the rest of the play, Carter tries to convince Tom that he should “stick to his own kind.”
Meanwhile Tom and Helen are falling more and more in love. Helen is offered a better job in another town but she doesn’t want to leave Tom. She asks if she can meet his friends, when he is hesitant, she knows that he is ashamed of her. But not wanting to give her that impression he tells her that she will meet his friends when they have a work
barbecue on the beach. The day arrives for the outing, but once they get there they are secluded from everyone. Helen brings up her concerns and gives him an ultimatum, either accept all of her and that includes defending her to his friends, or this cannot work. He replies that he cannot handle it and that she should take the job in the other town and both are left broken hearted.
Plot analysis
This play seems to follow a linear one act five to six part structure. The five parts being the series of events that make up the plot of the play.
#The State of Equilibrium or Stasis in the world of the play.
#The Inciting Incident and the catalyst of action
#Rising action
#Climax
#Resolution/New State of Equilibrium or Stasis.
In
Fat Pig
these are the are the important events corresponding with the list above.
#
The State of Equilibrium
- Helen has come to terms with society’s view of her. She is single but content. Tom is a subscriber to the beauty and success ideals of today by counting calories and working at a generic firm making money.
#
Inciting Incident
- When Tom asks Helen out in the cafeteria.
#
Rising action
- When Carter sees them in the restaurant. When Carter and Jeannie find out that the women the restaurant is Helen, Tom’s new girlfriend and try to convince him it won’t work.
#
Climax
- Tom simply cannot take the pressure from his friends anymore and tells Helen she should take the job. They breakup.
#
Resolution/New State of Equilibrium
- Tom is sorting out what he can handle. He loves Helen but cannot stand to watch the abuse she gets. Helen goes to take the other job.
Character guide
- Tom- The plot's protagonist. Late 20s to early 30s, he is a stereotypical man for his age group, until he meets Helen, and subsequently falls in love with
- Helen- A quite heavy, though self-confident librarian. She becomes Tom's love interest.
- Carter- Tom's closest male friend at the office. Carter represents the narcissistic and shallow qualities that Tom is trying to overcome.im
- Jeannie- Another co-worker at Tom's unnamed office firm. She and Tom used to date, but Tom was never fully committed to the relationship.
Labute provides very few details about the specifics of the characters' lives, beside from the fact that they all work and are in approximately the same age group.
Genre
Though classified as a dark comedy by many, the technical structure of
Fat Pig
tends to fall more in the category of drama. Drama is a relatively new term used for describing genre. It is differentiates from tragedy or comedy because it can have a happy or sad ending depending on the author’s viewpoint.
Dramas are about average people dealing with feasible problems. It is sort of a hybrid genre and can include all elements of classical tragedy and comedy, as well as farce and melodrama.
contains elements of all of these. Like a melodrama it is primarily character driven and like a farce has violent language. It has uncomfortably funny moments, especially when the character of Helen is making candid observations of how people perceive her. Farce is a comedic look at the cruelties that exist in the world, in this case a size-ist society.
Fat Pig
also has an element of a romantic comedy as well minus the happy ending. If one had to classify it more specifically, it could be considered a dark comedy, since the prefix of “dark” imposes the idea of a serious or sinister nature that pertains to the ending of the play. Also how the ideas are presented through dialogue, though comical, is addressing serious issues and fits into the dark comedy category.
Character analysis
Since
Fat Pig
is hard to classify as a specific genre most of characters have multifaceted purposes. So we can break down the characters, their roles with in the plot and their relationships with one another according to the four main genres of classical comedy and tragedy, and farce and melodrama as such:
- Classic Comedy
-As in classic comedy there is an alazon, or blocker,
- Classic Tragedy
- If one were to place Fat Pig
in the tragedy category, the tragic hero would be Tom. He wants to be accepted so badly by his friends and to stop the abuse of him and to not have to see the abuse of Helen by others, that he is willing to sacrifice his love for her. His harmartia, a term coined by Aristotle and used to discuss character change in plays, is that he lets the others win and doesn’t prevail in the just way.
- Melodrama
- In the scenario of Fat Pig
as a melodrama there is: a good guy, a bad guy, character in distress and the outsider.
- Farce
- In the context of a farce Fat Pig includes these structural characters: the sane person and the knave. The character of Jeannie could be considered a knave as she advances the plot with information she achieves by a passionate trickery or stealth (finding out about the date).
Style
Fat Pig
is a contemporary play and is told in the style of realism. As the audience, the audience sees the characters lives shown to us as the audience would live their lives. It shows us ordinary people with ordinary circumstances and problems. The language is colloquial and easy to access because it is language most people use every day.
Most realism plays are structured in a chronological and linear fashion like
Fat Pig
. Everything moves in a linear and cause and effect type of way.
Helen and Tom meet, they date, coworkers find out via a paper trail, coworkers ridicule and slander, Tom caves, etc. There are no flips or flashbacks every scene happens in time after the previous one: The date in which Carter intrudes happens after the scene where he says he is going to stop by to see if he is lying about the visitors from Chicago. Like most realist plays,
Fat Pig
is representational, meaning that the so called “Fourth Wall” is up. The audience sees a scenario played out in front of them and they are not addressed directly by the characters.
Labute is trying to objectify the situation, so the audience sees the scenario from both inside Helen’s and Tom’s relationship and out of it with Tom and Carter and Jeannie. Finally, realism is based on possible everyday situations. In
Fat Pig
the audience is asked to actually accept that this could happen to anyone they know or even to themselves.
Theme/idea
The title of the piece
Fat Pig
lends itself to a few assumptions. The play in a nutshell is about how society frowns upon overweight people. Helen the heroine of the play is the only character who does no wrong and she is the only one that is overweight. By having the protagonist, Tom, be so torn and ultimately decide against staying with Helen, Labute gives the viewer a chance to really think about what they have seen. He doesn’t let the audience gloss over the issue. Today we are told by some that the reign of the skinny model type is over and that the average American woman is a size twelve and that is beautiful…problem solved. Labute suggests that it hasn’t changed yet and there is still an overarching opinion that people who are overweight are addicts and unable to control their urges. But Labute argues this in his forward to the play, “The Weight of the World,” “This low-carb, heavy work out cycle was becoming as addictive to me as food had ever been, and I didn’t see an end in sight.”
[1]
Fat Pig
is a social commentary not only about the hold that our Hollywood ideological society has over us but also about personal introspection. The play lends itself to apply to many different issues, such as racism, sexism, social and economic discrimination. Labute says,
“I see a lot of myself in Fat Pig; whatever the name of the piece, the story really deals with human weakness and the difficulty many people face when trying to stand up for, live up to, or come out for something they believe in.”
Spectacle
The spectacle of the play really has to do with the harsh realism of the presentation. It is so “in your face” that many people are perturbed by the content and the way the heroine is treated. Stark and realistic lighting would be used as to really accent the reality of the world on stage. The characters are dressed stylishly and in contemporary clothes, especially Carter and Jeannie, to emphasize their attachment to aesthetic pleasures. The set usually is simple; Tom’s office and bedroom are typical for a young professional man, the restaurants and the cafeteria represented by different types of tables you would find in any kind of casual dining restaurant. The last scene at the beach is bare, so the audience is very focused on what is being said during the break up.
Language
Since
Fat Pig
is fairly new and is given to us in the style of realism, there is a result of colloquial and casual language.
[2] Any audience member understands the blunt insults and references made by the characters, because the characters talk like the average American and use slang such as common swear words and phrases. The characters also would talk in a casual and typical rhythm as well.
Sample production history
Off-Broadway premiere
Opened on November 17, 2004 Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Class Company (MCC) Theatre in New York City and directed by Jo Bonney. Cast was as follows:
Ashlie Atkinson (Helen),
Andrew McCarthy (Carter),
Jeremy Piven (Tom),
Keri Russell (Jeannie).
This production was hailed as a provocative comedy that made the audience think. David Amsden said in New York Magazine,
“You emerge from his plays either praising him for the metaphoric slap in the face or simply wishing you knew where he lived, so you can hunt down the bastard and deliver a literal slap of your own. The guy is doing something right, in short…. His cruel wit and chronicles of immoral moralizers have made him, arguably, the most legitimately provocative and polarizing playwright at work today.”
Labute Festival 2006
The play was showcased during the Labute Festival at the Studio Theatre in
Washington D.C. The play featured
Tyler Pierce as Tom, and Kate Debelack who played the role of Helen.
[3]
2007 Los Angeles production
The
Los Angeles premiere was May 11, 2007 at the
Geffen Playhouse's
Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theater, with a cast including
Kirsten Vangsness as Helen,
Scott Wolf as Tom,
Chris Pine as Carter, and
Andrea Anders as Jeannie.
[4] The play, originally scheduled to run until June 10, 2007, was extended to July 1, 2007, with a new cast - original New York cast member
Ashlie Atkinson as Helen,
Joe Sikora as Tom,
Jon Bernthal as Carter, and
Jamie Ray Newman as Jeannie.
[4] [6]
2008 London production
Its
United Kingdom premiere runs from
27 May 2008 at the
Trafalgar Studios,
London, with a cast including
Ella Smith as Helen,
Robert Webb as Tom,
Kris Marshall as Carter and
Joanna Page as Jeannie.
In August it was announced that both Marshall and Webb would be stepping down from their roles and be replaced by
Kevin Bishop and
Nicholas Burns, respectively.
[7]Also announced later in the same month was that Page would be stepping down from her role and would be replaced by
Kelly Brook in October 2008.
[8]
On September 11, 2008, the play was shown at the
Comedy Theatre.
2009 Colombian production
The
Colombia premiere was March, 31 at the Teatro Nacional La Castellana in Bogota, with the cast Constanza Hernández as Helena, Fabián Mendoza as Tommy, Tatiana Rentería as Julia and Juan Sebastián Aragón. Directed by Mario Morgan. http://www.teatronacional.com.co/
About the author
Neil Labute was born in Wayne, Michigan and raised in Spokane, Washington. He attended
Brigham Young University where he studied theatre. Later on he went to study at the graduate level at
New York University, the
Royal Academy of London and the
University of Kansas.
He returned to his alma mater, BYU, in 1993, to premier
In the Company of Men
. Later he went on to teach drama in Indiana where he continuously worked on the play and later adapted it to film. The film won several awards including the Filmmakers Trophy at the
Sundance Film Festival.
In 2000 he wrote an off-Broadway play entitled
Bash: Latter-Day Plays
, a set of three short plays. These were about respected member of the Mormon Church doing horrible and evil deeds. This play resulted in his being expelled from the Mormon Church. His next play,
The Mercy Seat
was about the 9/11 and one of first reactions in the theatre community, in 2002. The play is about a man who worked in the twin towers but was gone that day and not at work because he was with his mistress. His family thinks he could be dead and the play is about him deciding to use the attack as an advantage to run away from his life and go off with his mistress or stay. Others of his most acclaimed and controversial works are:
Autobahn, Your Friends and Neighbors
(starring
Ben Stiller),
Nurse Betty, Possession
and
The Shape of Things
.
Awards and nominations
- Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play in 2005
- Nominated for Laurence Olivier Awards for Best New Comedy in 2005
References
- Labute, Neil. “Fat Pig.” Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004. New York.
- Rush, David. “A Student Guide to Play Analysis.” Southern Illinois Printing Press, 2005. Carbondale, IL.
- In 'Fat Pig,' a Slim Chance for True Love
- http://broadwayworld.com/article/LAs_Geffen_Playhouse_Extends_Fat_Pig_through_July_1_20070529
- http://broadwayworld.com/article/LAs_Geffen_Playhouse_Extends_Fat_Pig_through_July_1_20070529
- http://broadwayworld.com/article/Fat_Pig_Extends_at_Geffen_with_New_Cast_20070625
- Bishop and Burns to take on Fat Pig roles
- Kelly Brook to appear in 'Fat Pig'