REVIEWS ...
January 24, 2000
Get thrills and chills from 'Killer Joe'
By Jack Zink, Theater Critic
GableStage artistic director Joe Adler bites on a hard-as-nails drama whose comedy leers from underneath its murderous plot. But with a sure hand on an impeccable cast, he repeatedly peels Killer Joe's fingers off the audience's throat just before the gasp.
If the pressure weren't released, Killer Joe would be a confrontational thriller that never gets out of your face. It's there often enough as it is, with nudity, profanity, bone-crunching violence and threats of even more disturbing events.
Adler and his ensemble treat Killer Joe as if it were some mutant collaboration by Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Shepard, John Patrick Shanley and Clive Barker. Though unsettling, it's never as shocking or offensive as the material could be.
In a ramshackle trailer home on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas, there exists a luckless, feckless brood of civilization's castoffs. The middle-aged patriarch Ansel (Ken Clement) lives with his flirtatious, quick-tongued younger wife Sharla (Pamela Roza) and his skittish daughter by a previous marriage, Dottie (Charlie Becker).
Ansel's son Chris (Mark Whittington) bursts in shortly. He pushed his alcoholic mother -- Ansel's first wife -- around one time too many and got thrown out. Chris wastes no time convincing dad to have her murdered ("Is she really doin' anybody any good?") so they can split her life insurance policy and move up in the world. Dottie finds out, and so does Sharla, before the hit man of the title shows up.
The plot thickens just as Chris starts getting second thoughts. Before it's over, a doublecross is exposed that prompts a series of showdowns in the trailer.
David Caprita, best-known as an FM-radio morning show host but also with a few edgy stage roles to his credit, is Killer Joe, a rotten cop who takes the murder contract and Dottie as his mistress for down payment. This leads to Killer Joe's most sexually charged and disturbing scene. Becker's darting eyes and twitching mouth make her seem like a defenseless bird in a cage full of wildcats. Yet she conveys something dangerous about Dottie, as well. In its peculiar way, her performance is as powerful as any of the others.
Roza turns her image upside-down again as the loudmouthed Sharla, a command performance that's as much comic as it is trashy. Roza, like the others, has nerves of steel for a mostly nude scene that is no way sexually titillating. The same goes for Caprita, naked except for a pistol. They both succeed in maintaining Killer Joe's dramatic focus in spite of the distraction of being uncostumed.
Clement and Whittington are similarly convincing as the hapless father and son, who drift into their murderous plot as if it were just something to do on an uneventful day. That's what makes Killer Joe so scary. And so gruesomely funny.
Through every plot twist, Letts' torturous story remains plausible, an R-rated examination of society's bottom rung that won't let you turn your eyes away.
Jack Zink can be reached at 954-356-4706 or jzink@sun-sentinel.com
