There’s chubby. There’s pleasingly plump. There’s big-boned.  There’s more-of-you-to-love. And then there’s, er, well…
            Fat is the other F-word.  And, in its way, it’s as strident, as provocative, as shocking.  Maybe more, times being what they are.  Fat Pig, which flaunts the most conspicuously confrontational title of the season, opens tonight at The Third Space.  The buzz is out there; the box office is hot.  Northern Light Theatre is fielding calls from people ordering tickets to “you know, that play,” as administrator Jason Magee reports.
            Fat Pig has blue-chip off-Broadway credentials.  It’s by Neil LaBute, a name to contend within misanthropy circles.  He’s the famously nasty American writer whose unsettling oeuvre includes a movie where guys gang up to humiliate a hearing impaired girl (The Company of Men), a stage trio where a bunch of apple-cheeked Mormons on a field trip beat a gay guy to death (Bashed), a chilling play where an art student makes a public case-study of her unsuspecting boyfriend (The Shape of Things).
            What jump-starts controversy changes from period to period, of course.  Sex and violence, so routine onscreen, are invariably more jolting in the theatre, where real live people are going at it or drawing stage blood.  Still, when LaBute hurls the epithet “fat pig” at us, we wince.  When someone in the play, a svelte woman, calls the very overweight Helen “a really fat sow” behind her back, to ridicule the work-mate who’s romancing her, we cringe some more.
            In the course of looking for actors to audition for the title role of the witty personable Helen, director Trevor Schmidt says he got turned down more than once by nervous women.  “One said, ‘This is just offensive’; another that ‘I don’t like what this play says.’”
            In the end, Schmidt found a remarkably calm and confident 22-year-old Carlye Windsor, making her pro acting debut in his production.  “The more shocking it is, the better I like it,” she shrugs good-naturedly, although she agrees with Schmidt that “Fat Pig isn’t out to shock.”
            The Newfoundland native, who arrives via theatre school in Camrose, says she wasn’t taken aback by the title.  “I’m very open about it,” she grins.  “I’m the one making more fat jokes than anyone else.”
            In a world of weight obsession, celeb diets and prejudice, Windsor is unafraid to use the word fat and enjoy the reaction from others.  “My friends and I use it all the time; we’re reclaiming the word,” she says mischievously.  “I’m comfortable with it.  When I was growing up, I guess I figured I might as well say it before someone else says it, so they’d be laughing with me.”
            For her cast mates, the bandying of fat jokes took some getting used to.  “It doesn’t make us squirm anymore,” says Jesse Gervais, who can talk about obesity, diets, and “oversize coffins” without flinching.  Schmidt teases Windsor: “I don’t even remember you’re fat.”
            “That’s my goal,” she smiles impishly.  Schmidt argues that Fat Pig “is much gentler than anything LaBute has written…No one wants to see a play where we put a large woman onstage and throw insults at her.  The play isn’t that.”  Structurally it alternates scenes where we see the burgeoning relationship between Tom and Helen, and workplace scenes where Tom is barraged by snarky jests about his choice of gal.  Will he be able to withstand the onslaught of public opinion? “It’s not about hurting Helen; she’s the best-adjusted, healthiest person onstage.  It’s about how it hurts Tom.”
            Lora Brovold, who plays one of Tom’s tormentors, says “the play isn’t about whether Tom can fall in love with an overweight woman.  He’s already done that.  It’s whether he can put up with tensions around him.  Will he be true to himself or go with the flow?”
            Gervais plays Carter, another of Tom’s derisive co-workers who “says some pretty awful things, like ‘God didn’t pair up apes and antelopes’. …But in a way, his argument makes sense.  He’s saying that it’s not nice, but it’s the way of the world.  It’s a social truth:  People aren’t comfortable with difference.  We’re all afraid of being the different person.”
            “It’s real,” says Skye Brandon, the Saskatoon-based actor who plays the beleaguered Tom.  “It’s one man’s struggle to be true to himself. …Tom comes to realize things about himself he may not want to know.

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