Non-human animals are so often conceived of as wholly different from us: incapable of understanding emotions, governed by primal instincts alone, without agency. As human animals, we sometimes are confronted with the outer barriers of this distinction — the pet dog that is “part of the family,” the gorilla that can say “I love you” in sign language, the orca mournsing a lost family member. But, in general, humans maintain a sharp divide between “us” and “them.” We wear cosmetics tested on rabbits and order Chicken McNuggets, Fish Filets, and Bacon McDoubles at the drive-through, all without thinking of the suffering and death inflicted on these animals for production. Even if we abstain from consuming animal products, our human infrastructure isn’t designed with non-human existence in mind. Birds fly into our windows, drivers kill 350 million vertebrate animals and billions of invertebrates each year on the United States’ roadways. This enforced distinction between human and non-human animals structures much of our economy — businesses from pet stores to factory farms to roadkill cleanup contractors (a $1-2 billion industry in the state of California alone).
Sophie McIntosh’s new play, “Road Kills,” produced by Good Apple Collectives at the Paradise Factory directed by Nina Goodheart, untangles the threads that tie humans, non-human animals, and industry together in a cruel and deadly web. The story unfolds over six weeks as cleanup contractor, Owen (D.B. Milliken), and his court-appointed teen assistant, Jaki (Mia Sinclair Jenness), traverse up and down a wide highway, scraping off a dead fawn frozen to the road, gagging while disposing of a skunk, and (partially) comforting a man grieving his runaway dog. (The various deceased animals are created in gory detail by props designer Sean Frank). While some might approach this work callously or cynically, Owen, having taken over the business after the premature death of his father, Owen treats the animals he encounters with the seriousness of a hospice nurse helping their souls transition from one life to the next. While digging graves to bury the small creatures, he prays for them, in earnest. Owen is reeling from the loss and his own misdeeds around that time.
Bovine sperm farm heiress Jaki, on the other hand, is less interested in beatifying skunk corpses and more interested in pouring tiny bottles of Jack Daniels into her Stanley Cup while erecting a facade of indifference to mask her simmering rage. If Owen treats roadkill with reverence, Jaki treats dead animals as they appear: as extremely gross objects, not something that could might have once had a soul. Jaki is a master of deflection — managing to do nearly everything but her job and Sinclair Jenness’ Jaki keeps the audience — and Owen — in the palm of her hand; a moment of impressive comedic work with a plastic straw before is followed by a monologue of righteous anger or narrating her latest sexual escapade.
Jaki seeks out ways to undermine Owen and his authority. She frequently threatens lawsuits claiming that her rich family could sue Owen out of house and home. At another point, she shows him a picture of that evening’s potential sexual partner. She asks Owen if the man is “fuckable or not.” Owen responds with concern that perhaps meeting a strange man for sex could be dangerous. But even as Jaki attempts to make the sexually repressed Owen uncomfortable, it becomes clear her attempts only elucidate the path before her: hypersexuality and self-destructiveness. Whenever Owen expresses concern, Jaki doubles down. There is no way off this ride for her. Jaki hopes it will end in death by liver failure before the age of 30.
In what becomes a somewhat heavy-handed foreshadowing of Owen’s confession, Jaki discusses the work her family does harvesting bull semen: workers anally insert a metal rod into the bull, who is then subjected to a two-second electric shock, causing the bull to ejaculate. Jaki justifies this horrifying practice — half the audience audibly gasped — by saying that given the bulls can’t understand what is happening to them, they are incapable of giving, or taking away, consent. But why is this violation, which would be unacceptable for any human to experience, considered acceptable when it is an animal? This question is posed and overlays Jaki’s own contending with the painful memory of her consent being ignored, — and the return of the perpetrator, played with fraternity brother smarminess by Michael Lepore. Eventually Owen, who seems like an apostle throughout the play, reveals his own sins against animals. He is unsure how to seek forgiveness for them — they are disturbing enough to create an irreparable rift between the two characters. No one is as they seem. Though she appears like the perpetrator, it appears all the men in Jaki’s life have let her down.
The rural roadways at the center of Road Kills are dangerous, not just for deer and dogs and insects, but for people. Jaki and Owen spend a great deal of time scanning the road, looking out for oncoming traffic as the other pick up dismembered animal parts from the road. Faced with an approaching speeding semi-truck, the human body will fare no better than that of an elk.
If McIntosh’s play starts off as a quirky workplace comedy, it morphs into something much darker: a meditation on the blurry line between human and non-human animals, and the ways that the mistreatment of one creature reveals a wider web of injustice. The play’s title, afterall, is a sentence, not a noun.
Leave a Reply