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 the dusty town of Amboy 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.
"The most contemporary piece of theatre I have seen...Bailey's play is not only refreshing but badly needed." —Dallas Jazz News
"Shakespeare on the plains...I haven't been quite so pleased with an opening in a long time!" —WFAA Radio, Dallas
"Hard to believe but funny...pure theatrical gold [with] a devastating satirical undertone...overpowering!" —Daily Oklahoman
"Unique comic vision...pure fascination and joy...one of those rare theatrical experiences that actually 'happens' for an audience!" —Dallas Jazz News
"Perhaps the secret of this alchemy is Bailey's ability to see Western mythology in science-fiction-like terms, with the desert landscape doubling as a sort of convoluted lunar surface." —Daily Oklahoman
"A seriocomic western tale...[an] absurdist comedy...All the action takes place on a marvelous saloon-desert-porch set, and the quality of acting is uniformly excellent." —Dallas Morning News
The Los Angeles Times thinks Bailey's work is a "mix of the Marx Brothers, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Thing...entertaining and tense!"
The Mountain Observer in New Mexico says his plays are "brave, alternative, distinctly American theatre! Action-packed [and] truly absurd!"
"The story that unfolds owes much less to John Ford and the traditional western than it does to Sam Shepard, Russ Meyer, the Three Stooges and Astounding Stories...If asked what Rio Pork is about, I suppose I'd say it's about personal relationships and power. But its treatment of themes is purely theatrical, and so, rather than stooping to dramatic discussions about the meaning of sex and life and death, Rio Pork simply enacts Bailey's unique comic vision..." —Dallas Jazz News
"Bailey writes with a directness that avoids inflated symbols and easy pathos and makes you believe in his characters." —Louisville Courier-Journal
