REVIEWS ...
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Child killers, or victims?
Riveting mystery-thriller Pillowman takes a hard look at guilt, justice and morality.
By Jack Zink
Pillowman. McDonagh's detective duo has finished shaking down theater audiences in London and New York, and is staking out playhouses throughout the United States.
For the moment, they're roughing up some fortunates at the GableStage in Coral Gables, in a regional premiere that qualifies as yet another grotesque trophy on director Joseph Adler's mantel.
McDonagh maintains that he doesn't try to write violent stories -- but admits they all seem to turn out that way. The Pillowman may be his most interesting so far, and is definitely his most Kafka-esque. The Lieutenant of Inishmore, still running on Broadway and destined for the GableStage next season, was written before The Pillowman and lacks its creepy subtleties.
The Pillowman is a tense mystery-thriller, during which street cop Ariel (Paul Tei) and detective Tupolski (Gregg Weiner) try to unravel a series of recent deaths involving children. We meet them during their interrogation of a geeky short-story writer named Katurian (Antonio Amadeo).
Before long the connection becomes apparent, if not conclusive. The writer's horror tales also involve the murder or suicide of young children.
These cops' interest and sense of urgency aren't hampered by concern for the suspect's rights. Their interrogation room is in the bowels of a totalitarian state's police station, has no mirrors, and comes equipped with such accessories as a 12-volt battery and electrodes.
Amadeo gives a superbly nuanced performance as the seemingly idealistic, emotionally (and physically) tortured writer. Questions of guilt rage around him early on, later replaced by issues of complicity.
That's because Katurian has a brother who's also in custody. Michael, though emotionally and mentally damaged by childhood abuse, is less a vegetable than David Perez-Ribada's portrayal suggests. Nevertheless, it's a fine performance that elicits and then absorbs sympathy like a sponge.
Tupolski is a self-professed (but not entirely truthfully) good cop; Jeff Goldblum played the role on Broadway as a goofily amoral intellectual. Weiner gives the role its due intellectual zip, but his Tupolski is a tough guy whose mortar is street grit, and whose humor is all sardonic. When he smiles, someone's in trouble. He smiles a lot.
Tei portrays the enforcer role with fierce dedication, though without the smoldering combination of anger and anguish that should make each minute in his presence seem unnerving.
The creepy tale includes even creepier background scenes involving Kim St. Leon and Kevin Reilley as Katurian and Michael's parents, who conducted a grisly experiment upon their childhoods, plus Karl Urban as a young boy and Sammi-Jack Martincak as a young girl.
Though McDonagh's play is suspenseful throughout, director Adler carefully alters its intensity up and down. The story ranges from bleak to darkly comic to oddly hopeful -- while leaving key questions of justice and morality floating, unanswered, on a separate thematic plane.
As for atmosphere, set designer Lyle Baskin's dingy police station basement reeks of the third world, and John D. Hall's lighting reveals (on cue) another world above, behind the station's greasy brick wall.
The Pillowman might just be the most arresting theater experience of a long, hot summer.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Theater Review: The Pillowman
By Hap Erstein, Palm Beach Post Theater Writer
GableStage is no stranger to grisly, dark plays with unexpectedly comic overtones, so it is hardly surprising how well the company takes to the works of Martin McDonagh.
This Irish writer has made his reputation with tales both extremely gruesome and highly theatrical, qualities much in evidence in The Pillowman. This one, however, is a departure from his usual setting in small, rural villages of his native land and is perhaps his most personal work yet.
For The Pillowman is about a fiction writer in an unspecified totalitarian state, detained by the police and interrogated about his manuscripts. Why? The macabre events described in them are being carried out by someone in real life, leading to the mutilation and death of small children.
In the course of getting the third-degree from a good cop-bad cop team, the writer - a pragmatist with the improbable name of Katurian Katurian - cooperates with them in order to exact a promise from the police that no matter what happens to him, his stories will be saved. Maybe McDonagh is just playing with us - as the cops often say to Katurian, using a decidedly cruder expression - or maybe he is metaphorically pondering how his work is perceived and worrying whether it will live on after him.
Either way, GableStage draws us into its web like a depraved Scheherezade, spinning horrific stories that spring to life as Katurian narrates, all under the unflinching direction of Joseph Adler. If anything, Adler takes a more comic approach to the play than the production on Broadway two seasons ago. But the laughter does not get in the way of the grim events depicted, either within Katurian's fables or in his cell.
Abuse is often Katurian's subject matter and, we soon learn, his personal history at the hand of his parents. Also abused was his mentally stunted brother Michal, whom the cops now have under custody in the next interrogation cell.
GableStage warns - or perhaps promises - audiences that The Pillowman contains disturbing material, notably in the stories that Antonio Amadeo recites, buying time before what he assumes will be his abrupt demise. These fables out-grim the Grimm Brothers, featuring severed digits, ingested razor blades, a little girl who fancies herself the Second Coming of Christ and the title story, about a mysterious figure who woos children to their death.
Amadeo is verbally agile, both as a storyteller and as a man fighting for his life. He is up against two worthy adversaries in Paul Tei and Gregg Weiner, as gruff and hostile Ariel and the seemingly more friendly Tuploski, but both cops merely want to play with Katurian's mind. David Perez-Ribada is a last-minute addition to the cast, but there are no signs of tentativeness in his scene-stealing performance as the mentally anguished Michal.
Although you would never classify McDonagh as an optimist, he does end The Pillowman with a ray of hope. And for theatergoers concerned about where good new writers are coming from, McDonagh himself is a ray of hope.
