A bizarre and uproarious dark comedy from prize-winning playwright Frederick Bailey...
"One of America's most theatrical playwrights." -Pulitzer-winner Beth Henley
"A REMARKABLE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT!" -Jim Beaver
Two men sit on the front porch of a run-down house in a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. A stranger staggers in, dying for a drink. Three men and one woman, alone in the desert, starved for sex, itching for violence, bothered by strange lights in the sky and visions of monsters and mushrooms, with a crazed wildman in a tattered cavalry uniform trying to tell them something...and they won't listen.
"Rio Pork is the first play I have totally enjoyed in years. Bailey's writing is brilliantly comic...and serious as only true comedy can be." -Dallas Jazz News
"Eugene Ionesco, Luigi Pirandello, and Gabby Hayes walk into a bar where Stephen Crane is serving drinks. Welcome to Rio Pork, a place on the outskirts of nowhere, where nothing makes sense except for the fact that everything does. Frederick Bailey's absurdist Western is a chimerical riot, filled with odd but gut-busting word-play and a sense that the world has gone mad. Like an Ives symphony, rich with hysteria and hysterical laughter, the meaning is in the sounds, not the notes. A remarkable literary achievement, great fun to read (and to act)." -actor/writer Jim Beaver (Supernatural, Deadwood, Justified, Crimson Peak)
RIO PORK: suitable for theatres large and small. A single set: a street in a dusty town near the dried-up Rio Puercos in the west Texas desert, 1891. A cast of five, one woman and four men. A full-length play running about 90 minutes without intermission.
Frederick Bailey's Vietnam War drama, THE BRIDGEHEAD, was co-winner of first prize at the New Play Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. His plays have been done off-off Broadway in New York and in various resident, university and waiver theatres from L.A. and Illinois to Boston and London.
