Natasha - The Artist

Breathing Time Productions‘ presentation of Fat Pig by Neil LaBute just closed this past Saturday August 11 in Ottawa. I was Production Coordinator for the show. I had an amazing time. I worked with a fantastic cast and crew. I had been dreaming for years and years about making this kind of art and here I was doing it. It almost felt surreal to me. And how amazing to work on this particular play.

The first time I read Fat Pig I thought I was bored half way through. Urrgh, not another thing about society’s judgment of what’s different. After attending the first week of rehearsals, I found out I was not bored at all; I had been shutting myself down to not be affected by my strong feelings for the subject matter. You see, what was affecting me the most was that the actress playing the overweight lead character, Helen, is a good friend of mine. I had been listening to her for months make comments about how she felt judged by people because of her weight, how she felt like hiding, how when she would pick-up McDonald’s at 1:00am to keep her weight up for the play she would stop eating at a stop light so the person in the next car would not notice… Not being overweight myself, having never experienced being overweight, I always thought she was just being dramatic and her lack of confidence made her see things in a negative way.

I was resisting writing about this. I am grieving. Deeply. I have been since the first week of the show and have been ignoring it until now. Seeing people’s reactions to the play, reading this particular review (http://www.cityjournal.ca/article-128371-REVIEWFat-Pig-cuts-close-to-the-bone.html – unfortunately, the article is no longer on the cityjournal Web site), seeing how difficult these roles are for the actors, has affected me. It has opened my eyes to this cruel world. This world is CRUEL, hurtful, mean, … Why is this world cruel? Because this world is SCARED. Scared of dying, scared of abandonment, scared of famine, scared of poverty, scared of being alone, scared of not being loved, scared of failure, …  We listen to people who feel the need to control. Why do some people need to control? Because they are scared… of all the same things. It’s a vicious cycle.

I am grieving. Grieving the fact that I have ‘ignored’ this cruelty since my birth. Ignored my friend thinking she was being dramatic, when in reality people are afraid of her, of what she ’as fat’ represents. I am sorry C.

Why hasn’t this hit me before? I already knew about fear and it’s consequences. So why this? Now? Because this realization has reinforced my purpose.  Working on Fat Pig has helped open a handful of audience members’ eyes about fear and cruelty. It means that I can keep working on projects like this, projects that can contribute to changing the world. It means that if I write from the heart, like LaBute, about these kinds of subjects, I can change the world.

TURDUCKEN [tur-duhk-kuhn] -noun: A chicken in a duck in a turkey.

Ok, this is going a bit far for Thanksgiving dinner:
http://www.thesalmons.org/lynn/turducken.html

Did I mention the recipe sounds very kinky?