"Pillowman" @ Berkeley Rep
Tortured Logic
Play Review: Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
To help fend off your mid-winter blues, Berkeley Rep has extended (through March) the run of this cerebral little comedy about the torture-death of children. With such a shocking mismatch of form and subject, playwright Martin McDonagh compels our guiltily voyeuristic attention to his theme: the real-world consequences of the fictions we
so compulsively generate.
McDonagh’s provocative scripts have earned him an Academy Award and made him the enfant terrible of the New York and London Stage. By the age of 29, he’d already become the first playwright since Shakespeare to have four plays running simultaneously in the West End. “Pillowman” rates as one of his most troubling efforts.
In the claustrophobic interrogation chamber of its one-room set,nightmare fantasies tend to become self-fulfilling. Yet story-telling also holds out the only hope of redemption for the doomed protagonists. This is a paradox well worth revisiting in an age when we find ourselves mired in endless war and torture on the basis of nothing but flawed, irresponsible narratives our “leaders” told us.
“Pillowman’ starts out with a narrator in the dock. Katurian (Eric Lochtefeld) is a virtually unpublished short-story writer whose only real audience, so far, has been his autistic brother, Michal (Mathew Maher). The two siblings find themselves hauled in for questioning about a string of mysterious kidnappings that have beset the capitol of a nameless dictatorship.
They’re grilled by an urbane senior detective (Tony Amendola) and his sadistic acolyte (Andy Murray). “I’m the good cop; he’s the bad cop,” the detective helpfully advises the hapless writer.
Both cops have read through Katurian’s entire 400-story opus. The confiscated manuscripts are all about children who wind up murdered, or murderous, or both.
No wonder; the stories are the product of a “literary experiment” in which Katurian’s parents kept the two brothers ignorant of each others’ existence in adjacent rooms. One of them, the future writer, was cosseted while the other brother was noisily tortured right next door every night.
Under this subliminal influence, Katurian developed a Kafkaesque turn of mind and phrase, as shown in several of his stories which are recited or dramatized onstage. So, in literary terms, the parents’ “experiment” succeeds. But the ordeal turned Michal autistic. When the outraged writer finally discovers the ruse, he smothers Mom and Dad with their pillows in their sleep.
The two brothers live on in obscurity until they’re hauled in for a police grilling. It turns out the modus of the current crime spree all-too-closely matches some of the artful touches in Katurian’s gruesome tales. After “softening up” by the police, the two brothers are dumped together in a holding cell, where the horrified Katurian discovers that Michal has, in all idiotic innocence, taken the stories as literal prescriptions for action.
To spare Michal the ordeal of police torture, Katurian snuffs his brother with a jailhouse pillow and then summons the two cops for a plea bargain. In exchange for a pledge to preserve his manuscripts as part of his police file and publicly release them 50 years later, Katurian offers his confession. In page after lurid page of his best prose, the writer admits to six killings: his parents, his brother and three local kids.
But upon interrogation, Katurian trips up on the details of the child-slayings – unsurprisingly, since he wasn’t there for any of them. The sadistic underling (himself a product of child abuse) wants to beat the truth out of him, but later comes to sympathize with the two brothers.
The senior detective, however, is unappeased. Since Katurian has made a false confession, all bets are off, including the promise to preserve his stories. The “good cop” summarily executes the writer and orders the manuscripts burnt – a directive that his “bad cop” sidekick quietly chooses to ignore.
And, strange to tell, we wind up somehow cheered that the stories survive. Even though these are the same stories that triggered the killings. Even though the stories came about through such a gruesome “experiment” to begin with. Yet these looming shadows leave us feeling more than a
little queasy about our own sense of relief.
And that, I think, is exactly the ambivalence McDonagh aims to achieve. He’s helped in it by Les Waters’ taut direction and, above all, by masterful casting (thanks to Amy Plotzkin and Janet Foster).
Katurian is Lotchefeld’s second Berkeley Rep appearance in less than a year in the role of a tortured writer. Last summer he played Tennessee Williams’ fictitious alter-ego in the autobiographical “Glass Menagerie.” The intensity and integrity he can bring to two such different parts is testimonial to Lotchefeld’s range as an actor.
Murray’s explosive Cockney bluntness, as the police bully, provides a perfect foil for the world-weary unctuosity of Amendola’s senior detective. Maher, as the autistic brother, manages to make idiocy eloquent with his stammer
and shuffle and hyperthyroid stare.
Waters paces the play briskly enough to move you from horror to gag lines and back without missing a beat. Russel Champa’s stark lighting and Obadiah Eaves’ percussive music help underscore the pervasive sense of menace.
The net effect is a wholly absorbing evening of theater that makes you wonder about your own attitudes and responsibilities as an audience and consumer of narratives. A timely reminder, these days.
