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PIG FARM Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 W. 46th St.; (212) 719-1300. Through Sept. 3.
IT seems apt that Greg Kotis would follow up his Tony-winning musical "Urinetown" with a show whose title is just as off-putting. But while the playwright's "Urinetown" was subversively witty in sending up musical-comedy conventions, the best the witless "Pig Farm" can do is riff on its characters' names, all of which begin with the letter T.
A sort of satire of Sam Shepard's middle-American absurdist dramas, "Pig Farm" attempts to achieve a Ridiculous Theater level of buffoonery, minus the inspiration.
It deals with the struggling marriage of pig farmers Tom (John Ellison Conlee) and wife Tina (Katie Finneran), who has just about reached the end of her rope because of Tom's unwillingness to have a child. She seeks solace in the arms of Tim (Logan Marshall-Green), their teenage farmhand, newly sprung from a juvenile detention facility.
On the professional front, Tom has been reduced to dumping sludge in a nearby river, a fact he desperately hopes to conceal from a prying EPA investigator (Denis O'Hare) who incongruously packs heat and takes snapshots of everything and everybody with abandon. While the setting would seem to lend itself to an amusing, "Tobacco Road" style of grotesquery, Kotis is unable to muster much in the way of satirical humor.
The chief joke arises from the characters repeatedly greeting each other by their first alliterative names (Tom: "Tina, Tim Tina: "Tom, Tim" ), a joke that wears thin long before its many repetitions.
Otherwise, the comic proceedings hinge on how this makeshift family settles conflicts with rolling pins, and the bizarre nature of the EPA man, who has the hots for Tina himself.
"You may hate the federal government, Tina, but the federal government loves you" is his idea of a romantic overture.
Director John Rando, another "Urinetown" alumnus, fails to bring much imagination to his staging, although the climactic moments, featuring a Grand Guignol-style bloodbath, at least have some liveliness.
The actors, apparently not quite sure exactly how to pitch their performances, do what they can, with Finneran particularly impressive as the earthy Tina.
Ultimately, "Pig Farm," like its characters, never lifts itself out of the mud.
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