Do you remember the board game "Chutes and Ladders," where players take turns climbing the rungs of a ladder, only to slide back to square one over and over again? The makers of the game illustrated the board with children who, for good behavior, were shown climbing the ladder, and for bad behavior were sent sliding down the chutes. KILL FLOOR, the new play that just went up at LTC3, depicts modern poverty, where the ladders are missing the lower rungs, and the gleaming steel chutes of modern America provide the blind and driving illusion of progress all the way back to square one.

Marin Ireland delivers a star turn as 'Andy,' a newly released ex-convict. Desperate for a job, she signs on as slaughter-house employee, where she's quickly sent to the kill floor. Every thirteen seconds a bolt gun kills a cow, while another machine lifts the fresh carcass out of the pen and skins it--sometimes while the animal is not quite dead. Accidents are common, sometimes leading to more pain for the cattle, and sometimes injuries for the workers. The kill floor itself is kept just beyond our sight, but its implications bleed out into every aspect of Andy's life.

Rick, Andy's affably manipulative and dangerously amorous boss (played by Danny McCarthy), ​ tells her not to worry: her co-workers are Mexicans ("good workers...reliable") but because his bosses are "racist as hell," she's likely to get promoted above them and sent upstairs to do office work. As the Bard says, "All [wo]men have some hope," and some hopes are higher than others.

Andy's desperation to find a job is rooted in her desire to provide for her biracial teenaged son, B, who is simply embarrassed by Andy's reemergence. B is understandably more interested in surviving high school and first-crushes than he is in bringing his estranged and needy mother back into his life. B remembers too well his mother's arrest, and Marin Ireland provides subtle, nervous gestures that suggest that Andy is still struggling with past addictions, though she insists otherwise to her boss.

Instead of loving his mother, B reaches out to Simon, a white schoolmate and self-fashioned rapper. Simone lays out "sick rhymes" for the benefit of B. B helps Simon score weed. More importantly, the two are caught in an unequal and entirely believable sexual awakening. 'Coming out,' which is getting easier in much of America, seems a nihilistic social choice in their world, and their relationship stands tensely at the edge of discovery. The two young performers, Nicholas L. Ashe and Samuel H. Levine, fully own their characters; under the guidance of director Lila Neugebauer, they create the play's most dynamic, topsy-turvy moments; even if Koogler's insights on race, sexuality, and high school politics are not radically fresh, they are truthfully delivered with wit, grace, and daring.

With B avoiding her, Andy hesitatingly looks for connection elsewhere. She first turns to Sarah (played by Natalie Gold), an outgoing woman from the right-side of the tracks; the relationship allows the play to show that the two women face similar emotional trials, but with such wildly different economic resources as to not be speaking the same language. Sarah thrives (and perhaps even applauds herself) for keeping Andy company, but Andy is unwilling or unable to broach her own past, and so their friendship is stunted. As that relationship stalls, Andy takes a turn into another dead-end by consenting to her married boss' request for a date.

Abe Koogler, showing his chops for modern drama, begins many of his quick, short scenes in media res, with the relationships already established and understood by the characters, and the drama centered on each person's peculiar verbal strategies as they drive after their meager, vulnerable (and often funny) desires.  He expertly writes in the staccato semi-fluency that thrives in America's small black box theaters.

(Why, in American dramas about the economically disadvantaged, is there a shortage of eloquent, rhetorically powerful people saying stupid things? It must be a two-hundred year carryover from the imprinting excellence of Charles Dickens. But Mark Twain is our man, and he had plenty of characters who earnestly believed in the tomato paste they were selling.)

At any rate, as with David Mamet and Annie Baker, each broken and partial sentence leaves room for our sympathies. The less the characters say, the more we root for them; the more they open their mouths, the more we know they lack the resources to thrive, and dash the hopes we have invented for them in their quiet moments.

The set by Daniel Zimmerman (wide, shallow, and grey) works with Ben Stanton's lighting and Brandon Wolcott's sound to deliver the audience into an icy world where a slaughterhouse and budget apartment share the same colorless walls. Prison and slaughter are never seen, but always present. The actors dart in and out of the wings like cattle through chutes, and neither they nor we have much idea of what's coming next. The simplicity of the design invited the imagination into the world of the play, and ties together the disparate threads of the story, so that the voices and themes from one scene echo into the next.

It is a play that disposes with an obvious ending, or a well-made play's denouement. Unlike in Annie Baker's THE FLICK (or Oscar Wilde's THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST), there are no craftily hidden pieces of paper that cause the play to burst into a climax and a resolution. Most of Koogler's characters could struggle on, nearly unchanging, and constantly caught off-guard, for years and years. Rather than forcing a neat cap on the play's final moments, Koogler brings it to a close at the ninety minute mark, like the closing shift in a warehouse; the lights silently dim on an evening of open, honest, and throat-catching performances. KILL FLOOR depicts characters living in poverty; they prove likable, but they will not win.

This play is a necessary stab in the eye to the Group Theatre's optimism at the end of the Great Depression.​

If the playwright senses hope, but sees little way out, then we should take his word for it, and thank him for his honesty: we should not request that playwrights invent neat little plots designed to satisfy our complacency. ​

In Christopher Sykes' 1959 biography of Orde Wingate, he uncovered Wingate's harsh criticism of T.E. Lawrence. Both Lawrence and Wingate were twentieth-century British officers who favored 'irregular warfare.' Their campaigns in the First and Second World Wars would influence future generations of military leaders, and the ways in which modern armies organize their forces.

Though separated by more than twenty years and two continents, the campaigning 'styles' of Lawrence and Wingate shared some similar features. Both wielded small numbers of men, and avoided sustained combat against larger rival forces. Both took exceptional personal risks. Both fought in foreign lands, and at the head of largely foreign soldiers.

The similarities between the two officers are clear, but the specifics of Wingate's criticisms are not quite as easily discernible. (Besides the Sykes biography, the two best sources for understanding Wingate's critique of Lawrence are two of his Abyssinian soldiers that followed him from Palestine: the officer Anthony 'Tony' Simmonds and the Jewish-Palestinian clerk Avram Akavia.) In his desert campaigns during the First World War, Lawrence had used British money to hire Arab tribesman to conduct irregular warfare against the Ottoman Empire. In Abyssinia in 1940, Wingate sought to use soldiers loyal to the British Empire to inspire Abyssinian 'patriot' forces to rally by his side; Wingate wanted to avoid direct payment and direct distribution of arms. Lawrence appealed to Bedouin patriotism, but he did so with a sense of irony and bemusement: nationalism, he thought, was a paltry motivation for the Bedouin, whereas British gold and war-time honor could provided more effective incentives. Wingate viewed Lawrence's approach as too close to bribery; Wingate wanted to appeal to patriotism and pride, and refused to allow direct payments to Abyssinian militia leaders or their followers.

The puzzling aspect of Wingate's critique is that, despite their technical differences, it seems as if Lawrence still could have served as an advantageous and famous model of successful irregular warfare, thus inspiring Wingate's commanders to devote further resources to his campaign; and Wingate, if nothing else, was obsessed with clawing for more resources. In fact, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell plainly states that Lawrence's previous efforts in WW1 directly influenced Wavell's deployment of Wingate in WW2 (see The Good Soldier, 1948). But instead of substantiating an ostensibly favorable comparison, Wingate denigrated Lawrence's methods as wasteful and ineffective. Why?

First, I want to avoid rarifying 'denigration.' ​Denigration occurs in everyday life on a regular basis. In front of spouses, friends, and partners, human beings denigrate potential rivals to sculpt their own status position relative to that of the rival. Some typical, casual examples include: "He's not that good of a writer." "If only her talent could keep pace with his ambition." "She's pretty, but she doesn't have taste." Denigration occurs for other reasons, however, besides rivalry for status. Other possibilities include 1) a genuine disagreement about strategy 2) Jealousy. 

I think that rivalry over status is the best answer. It doesn't matter that Lawrence was dead; rivalry is not a 'reasonable' thing. It's a basic mechanism that propels us unwittingly forward. It often happens subconsciously, and rarely needs to justify itself. ​

Wingate, however, was a pensive officer, and he was the sort that would search-out a basis for his feelings about Lawrence. I think it's likely that Wingate not only disliked Lawrence's 'methods,' but found fault with Lawrence's personal conduct during military operations. In particular, Wingate probably felt that Lawrence had abdicated his personal responsibilities as an officer to play too-much the desert warrior.

A quick comparison of the two men can highlight their differences in outlook: Whereas Wingate was a career-oriented soldier, Lawrence was an amateur officer. Wingate never lost any family members to war, but Lawrence lost two brothers before embarking on the campaign to take Aqaba. Wingate preferred leading professional soldiers on well-organized campaigns; Lawrence had a respectful but difficult relationship with professional soldiers, and preferred fighting alongside loose bands of Arab raiders. Wingate directed and orchestrated violence in the traditional manner of an officer, whereas Lawrence preferred hands-on violence in the style of a medieval knight (and hated/loved himself for it).
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​There are no records of Wingate actually shooting an enemy in combat--he was too busy maintaining his erratic supply line and keeping his troops on a relentless march. Lawrence, however, fired his weapon often, and preferred the emotional rush of battle to the more mundane tasks typically required of officers in combat. Lawrence's emphasis on action, in Wingate's view, was an abdication of responsibility. 

Lawrence, I think it's fair to say, had a much better nose for politics, bureaucratic maneuvering, and power. He could also express his thoughts clearly, eloquently, and in an interesting way. But despite his clear talent for political life, Lawrence prioritized his efforts in the second-half of the First World War towards hands-on participation in violence. His own memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and his letters from that time period show a keen awareness of the ongoing political situation in the Levant. But those same sources also point to the fact that Lawrence was more interested in being involved in raids and ambushes.

Wingate seems to have noticed the peculiarities of Lawrence's behavior as an officer, and he also noticed that Lawrence used direct payment because this was Lawrence's easiest and quickest way to get rid of the resources the British Empire offered him, thereby freeing Lawrence to charge back into the mix on personal terms.

Only once Lawrence was in Damascus did he refocus his energies towards politics; but at that point, it was too late. The Arab forces that he had he supplied and fought with lacked the hierarchical structure and discipline necessary to successfully occupy and manage a city. Lawrence also did not concern himself with the legitimacy of his occupation of Damascus, or how it would be perceived by the locals. (I am not saying that the British Army's occupation of Damascus was legitimate; I am just pointing out that they were better prepared for it.)

Wingate had a bold imagination, and he was unusually lucky in his guesses on how things would turn out. But his writings betray a lack of specificity and accurate knowledge of human behavior. He was very smart, energetic, and imaginative--but he was not as accurate or precise of an observer of human political behavior as Lawrence. Wingate did, however, simply care more about politics: he took steps at every juncture of his planning to build working, useful coalitions. And Wingate bothered to make assessments about whether or not his plans gelled with the local political situation in the Sudan, Palestine, Abyssinia, and Burma. That's not to say that Wingate was a purely strategic animal: like most generals, his goal was not to win the war, but to ensure that his campaign succeeded. The terms of a success in a campaign can be objectively measurable, even if they are also objectively pointless from a wider perspective. Wingate was perfectly comfortable with that paradox; Lawrence tried (and failed) to ignore it, which led to a crises of consciousness for the rest of his life, and to his writing of a Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a memoir seeped in self-searching and unrest.

I think Wingate deserves some credit for his reading of Lawrence's outlook on military affairs. While Lawrence did not deserve the harsh disparagement that he received from Wingate, Wingate did notice Lawrence's unusual motives for war. And he probably saw that Lawrence's personal motives diverged from those of career soldiers and politicians.

​From a distance, the tactical approaches of Wingate and Lawrence still resemble one another. They rode similar horses towards similar objectives, but they rode for different reasons, and these differences materially affected the lives of their men, the results of their campaigns, and their own self-regard at each step of the journey.