There was a time when citizens of other industrialized nations looked at the United States as an impoverished, derelict sinkhole where  industry ran roughshod over the rights and well being of the everyday man. When Bertolt Brecht adapted his musical Happy End into his signature epic-style drama, he used the stockyards of  Chicago as the setting for a play about modern industrialism and the plight of the working class.  There, he could show the horror and filth that unchecked industry had wrought on the poor, and how the greed of men and pitiless market forces could starve and mangle an entire city of people.

With his new translation, Peter Mellencamp has deepened Brecht’s imagery by changing some of the names. St. Joan of the Slaughterhouses maintains some of the whimsy and all of the hopeless class  struggle from earlier translations (most of which use Stockyards in the title). Brecht’s story of Joan Dark, an innocent missionary whose evangelism brings her to the slums of Chicago where she entangles herself in the politics of the meat packing industry, is told with reverence of the legendary playwright’s intent: to historicalize a social issue and force an audience to confront the ills of their own society. This production largely avoids melodrama and leans instead on farce and indication which repels sentimentality and keeps the viewer’s mind on the issues at hand.

The action is stuffed into Pacific Resident Theatre’s narrow blackbox, a space that challenges director Michael Rothhaar to send his actors either up or down stage with every exit. When combined with the script’s introduction of each new moment, performed by various characters directly to the audience, the result is an easy to follow parable with successive episodes and abrupt lessons which are carried from scene to scene. The set is appropriately sparse with work benches and wooden tables which serve as desks, pews and auction blocks. The upstage entrance is guarded by a massive sliding loading dock door which gives a satisfyingly dangerous groan when slammed shut.  Fractured heads on staves stand sentry along the walls, and also in the hands of actors which, with the adornment of hats from various professions, stand in for crowds of ranchers and traders. My favorite feature of the play’s design is a rusty chain strung through a pulley which, when tugged by a passing actor, lets out a deafening roar that signals a change of lighting and location.

Dalia Vosylius is the optimistically naive Joan Dark, dressed in the buttoned-up coats of an ordained comintern that Mellencamp retitles as the “Warriors of God.” Joan is alone among her fellow holyfolks, and as so many saints before her finds herself a martyr rather than a liberator. She is led through the  inferno of Chicago’s rusted and exploitive slaughterhouse floors by Slift, the second in command to the criminally clever tycoon Pierpont Mauler. Slift is played with noirish evil by set and lighting designer Norman Scott, bald but for a blade of silver hair hidden under a black fedora. Andrew Parks is solid as Pierpont Mauler, and while his infatuation with Joan is explained by little else than a fondness for her innocent and attractive face, his oscillation between repentance and profit-mongering is the main thrust of the show. Linda Lodge and Ed Levey stand out as wretched slaughterhouse workers who, in the interest of their survival, commit unspeakable acts. The play makes an excellent display of how poverty and wretchedness of conscience go hand in hand, and if not for the forgiving sentiments of the main character, we are tempted to blame the poor for their own sad circumstances.

The performance of this play, in this decade, and in a town like Venice where industrial exploitation on this scale is unheard of, still provides some valuable commentary on the state of our economy. Most striking is the prominence of Mauler’s price gouging and market swindling - in an earlier day this finagling may have landed flat when shown next to the plight of the factory worker. Nowadays, the dishonest use of market forces and the single-handed ruin of a vital American industry rises through as a very current concern and a legitimate class issue. On the other hand, the play makes one thankful for the reforms that early 20th century worker’s movements forced onto American industrialists. Our country’s workplaces are far from perfect, but stories of men falling whole into slaughtering machines and packed into cans and sold are far less common and accepted as they were in depression-era Chicago. Our legacy as a laissez-faire nation where heartless industrialists could treat men like the very cattle they were hired to dismember has been softened by better wages and conditions, and tempered by an organized labor system that is a hallmark of American progress.

Of course, globalization has lessened the need of those same business owners to deal with American labor laws and practices. The folks next door to PRT at the Social and Public Art Resource Center have countless works on display that highlight the struggles of immigrants to achieve similar equality in the workplace, and while America has improved the lives of workers in our nation, our business leaders have moved their operations to countries whose governments have as little concern for safety and their people’s well being as Pierpont Mauler and his fellow swine. We are far from perfect, and Brecht will always be there to show us why. In its final act, St. Joan of the Slaughterhouses dissolves into a chorus of song and rhyming couplets, including a parody of the Battle Hymn of the Republic that mocks religion’s usefulness to the working class and confronts the bourgeois notion that profit and opportunity are available to those who truly deserve it.

St. Joan of the Slaughterhouses is by Bertolt Brecht with a new translation by Peter Mellencamp. Directed by Michael Rothhaar, the cast includes Robin Becker, Ed Level, Linda Lodge, Andrew Parks, Tony Pasquiani, Daniel Riordan, Normn Scott, Penny Safranek and Dalia Vosylius. Norman Scott designs the set and lights with costumes by Danielle Ozymandias and musical direction by Carolyn Mignini. It is produced by Terry Davis and Jeanette Driver for Pacific Resident Theatre.

Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses opens Thursday, June 18 at 8:00 P.M. with performances Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 P.M.; Sundays at 3:00 P.M., closing Sunday, August 9, 2009

Tickets are $18.00 with group rates available.

Pacific Resident Theatre is located at 707 Venice Blvd, Venice, CA 90291 (four blocks west of Lincoln Blvd.).

For reservations purchase tickets on line at http://www.pacificresidenttheatre.com or at (310) 822-8392.