On Post: Pig, Sheep, and Wolves

Date: January 14, 2014

The song tells the story of a pig committing the murder of a sheep and pinning it on a wolf. It made me think of ANIMAL FARM which is, of course, the story of animals establishing a government that is an allegory for the creep of communism. This song could easily be an allegory for criminal behavior in a similar way so I set about writing something that would provide that human story for the song to be analogous to.

The fun of this one was figuring out how to retroactively build the story from the lyrics. Making wolves into the masses who’d wish harm on the victim. The victim, the judge, while not a pack animal, is someone with multiple “predators” who might look to do him harm. Our protagonist has no reason to kill the judge and the pig has no cause to break the food chain to kill a sheep. And so on.

In the initial writing, I was considering using a newspaper as a “prop” to reveal that the monologue was no mere hypothetical but I realized newspapers are often difficult to read for an audience in a theatre setting—font size and lighting, to name two, would be very limiting—and it was also block the protagonist’s face which I wanted to use to its fullest creepiness. The radio seemed a better choice then as there’s no need to read, nothing blocks the monologist’s face, and it didn’t present competing things to watch like using TV as the delivery method.