Pig Girl

Based on the infamous Pickton murders case, playwright Colleen Murphy’s Pig Girl was first performed in 2013 and published in 2015. Port Coquitlam, British Columbia pig farmer Robert Pickton was arrested in 2002 after the remains of 33 different women, many identifiable only through genetic testing, were found at his pig farm. Most of the women were Indigenous. Eventually, Pickton was indicted and convicted for the murders of six of these women. The lack of indictment for the crimes he committed against other women caused a scandal, widely decried as a prime example of the low esteem that the Canadian government—and Western governments more broadly—have for Indigenous women. Murphy has come under criticism as a white woman attempting to write from the perspective of Indigenous women victims. Not all Indigenous critics have found fault in Murphy's play, however: Notably, it was supported by Métis playwright and actor Keith Barker, who also defended the extreme violence of the play as essential to its message and the truth of the real world events it's based on. Murphy is best known for her plays Beating Heart Cadaver and The December Man, which were nominated for and won the Governor General's Award for English-Language drama in 1999 and 2007, respectively.

Pig Girl is set in the barn of a pig farm owned by the straight-forwardly named antagonist, Killer. Its three other characters are Dying Girl, Sister, and Cop. Although all the characters inhabit the same space, the play comprises two different temporal lines. Killer and Dying Girl share one timeline, during which Killer slowly and gruesomely harms and eventually kills Dying Woman and a later timeline in which Sister, the sibling of Dying Woman, confronts the Cop about his dismissive and demeaning handling of Dying Girl's case. Sister exhorts him to think of Dying Girl as an actual person, chastising him for not making more progress. By intercutting the scenes between Dying Woman and the Killer with the later scenes between Sister and the Cop, Murphy adds a stark and unsettling immediacy to Sister's plaintive desire to find out what happened to her sister.

A side effect of the alternating scenes is that the terrifying and violent death of Dying Woman is drawn out over the course of the play's hour and a half-run time. “Essentially, the Dying Woman (as she’s called) is protractedly slaughtered throughout the play’s grueling 90 minutes. How can an audience be expected to stomach this? One answer is that it can’t, and that’s partly the play’s point” (Montreal Gazette). As the Killer tortures the Dying Woman, it is eventually revealed that he had been abused as a child by his parents, especially by his mother. Not all critics have appreciated this gesture toward humanizing the Killer. “While Murphy gives a voice to the murdered women she also, rather less successfully and almost certainly unnecessarily, gives one to the killer too” (Lyn Gardner, The Guardian).



As the second timeline of the play progresses, the Cop—initially unmoved by the Sister's protestations on behalf of her sister and other exploited sex workers and Indigenous women—becomes increasingly obsessed with the missing Dying Woman. He comes to realize how biased and ineffectual his prior actions have been. He and Sister clash continually, even as their need to discover what has happened to Dying Woman is a precondition for each one’s sense of closure over the incident. Rather than bringing them closer together, the crime simply moves them into parallel states of unease and depression—a commentary on the way violent and racist crimes like those perpetrated by the Killer continue to echo down generations.

In a gesture toward the challenging nature of the play—its violence and its potential to be interpreted as white exploitation of Indigenous tragedy—its first performance, in Edmonton, Canada by the Edmonton Theatre Network (an all-white cast), was followed by a question and answer session with the playwright, director, and cast. The session also featured informational talks by multiple people who work with sex workers and represent various advocacy/charity groups, including Project KARE, Kindred House, and CEASE. The point of the session was to connect the play back to the real-world topics it portrays in miniature. Whether this aspect of the original performance negates the concerns about Murphy's potential appropriation of the Indigenous experience remains an open question, but it does reframe Pig Girl as an explicitly political work that aims at activism.