Rindon Johnson
Meat Growers: A Love Story










The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100. The setting is a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meat growing plants. The protagonists seem to move through their day automatically, yearning for each other, as the viewer acts as a friend and confidant, silently bearing witness to their desire. In the play, gender is never mentioned, and race is ambiguous. The viewer’s character carpools to work in a solar VW bug, listening to their colleagues’ enthusiastic monologues, and watching the landscape roll by. The conversation revolves around their relationship with the natural landscape around them, with disease, modes of production, and survival needs, but moves on to discussions of intimacy, and is suffused throughout with love and longing between the two. This VR play was staged using a game engine, and the ready-made aesthetics of this contribute to the sense that the work creates one version of the future (among many possibilities) being prototyped—a decidedly less than utopian version, but one that makes space for labor, love, and survival.