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Live Theatre

By Josh Hornbeck

ACT Theatre

Seattle, Washington

Story is an essential part of the human experience.  We laugh it off and tell ourselves stories don’t matter.  Stories are for children, right?  After all, it’s just a story.  But throughout our culture, everywhere we look, we are bombarded by stories.  Obviously, story is present in the novels we read and the movies we watch.  It shows itself in the ways “Reality Television” is shot and chopped to follow a narrative arc.  The most fascinating news segments are ones with a compelling story attached.  Story is built into the very fabric of who we are as men and women.  It’s said that everyone’s got a story, and in Martin McDonagh’s latest thriller, The Pillowman, the Irish playwright examines just how powerful stories can be.

An immense grey obelisk fills the circular stage.  No matter where you are positioned in the audience, all you can see is concrete and barbed-wire, obfuscating our view.  This square monstrosity so dominates the small theatre, it’s impossible to think of anything else.  We begin the play, wondering whether we’ll be able to see the action, whether this obstruction on stage will prevent us from knowing some essential detail of the play, some moment of terrible import and insightful illumination.  When the wall is lowered (much as the curtain is raised for most productions), the audience breathes a collective sigh of relief.  There are no more walls, nothing to keep us from full knowledge of the story and its themes – nothing physical anyway.

The stage is spare – a stool, a chair, a filing cabinet, a waste-bin – and a young man sits alone, blindfolded.  After a moment a silence we hear a massive metal doorway open and close.  Two men in suits enter.  One of them speaks to the young man in the blindfold.

“Why are you still wearing that?”

“I assumed you didn’t want me to take it off.”

“Well take it off.  You just look stupid.”

The two suits are policemen.  The young man tries to cooperate but has no idea why he has been detained.  He comes and goes from work.  He looks after his ‘challenged’ brother.  He writes stories.  There are over four hundred of them.  He assumes that there must be something in one of his stories that is offensive.  Something that criticizes the police or the government.  “Fine,” he says.  “Let me know what I’ve written that’s offensive and I’ll take it out right away.”

But the officers don’t tell him what he’s done wrong.  Instead, they read the stories confiscated from his apartment.  Fairy tales.  Children’s stories.  But they’re even grimmer than the darkest of fairy tales by Grimm or Anderson.  Children are killed with razor blades in apples.  A man chops off a little boy’s toes.  The stories are dark and twisted.  And as the officers read them, the young man expresses pride in his little literary masterpieces.

Slowly, they come to the point.  There has been a series of murders.  Children have been killed through brutal and vicious means – all echoing the circumstances of the young man’s stories.  So the young man and his handicapped brother are their only suspects.  And as the stories are told, truths are made evident only to become hidden once again.

ACT’s production of The Pillowman deftly manipulates the play’s air of confusion and obfuscation.  The towering obelisk which dominates the stage in the pre-show and intermission is the most elaborate visual method director Kurt Beattie employs to keep the audience wary of what is being revealed and what is hidden.  Throughout the play this theme keeps recurring.  The officers interrogating Katurian, the writer, tell him that his brother, hidden several cells away, has already been beaten and tortured into confessing.  When he finally is allowed to see his brother, the siblings slowly circle around the truth, hiding and revealing in equal terms.  One of Katurian’s stories features a boy whose parents keep a dark secret hidden behind a locked door.  Another features a man in prison for a crime he doesn’t know he’s committed.  Truth and secrets are central to the play and the block is a strong, visceral design element that adds yet another layer of secrecy.

Once the obelisk is lowered, once the set becomes this stark, empty space, Beattie is forced to rely on the strength of his actors and the power of McDonagh’s script.  The cast is comprised of four actors; the two police officers, Katurian and his brother.  Matthew Floyd Miller, playing Katurian,  has the hardest role to fill.  He’s not only been placed in an extreme and emotionally exhausting situation, but also must tell one story after another in such a way that we, the audience, get sucked into these short, brutal folk tales.  And his performance is exquisite.  Mesmerizing.  We hang on Miller’s every word, seeing the stories as he paints pictures for us with his voice and nothing more.  Both Denis Arndt and R. Hamilton Wright bring a real exuberance and – dare I say it – joy to the roles of interrogator and torturer.  Wright, a fixture in the Seattle theatre community, gives one of the greatest performances of his career, managing to be funny, brutal and sympathetic all at once.  The weakest link in the main cast is Shawn Telford, filling the role of Michal, Katurian’s brother.  Mental handicaps are both the easiest and most difficult roles to play.  Occasionally Telford delves beyond stereotype and caricature, but more often than not, his Michal just feels like a grown man pretending to be a little kid.  However, this casting deficit never takes away from the power of the play and the other performances.

The Pillowman is a grim play, but it is full of rich and surprising humor.  McDonagh’s Irish temperament come out in full force as talk of murder and execution and torture and dismemberment are all accompanied by a hearty and somewhat disturbing dose of laughter.  At times we laugh because we are surprised by what we’re hearing.  Other times the verbal wit and banter between the characters transcends the mood and the subject matter.  It would be all too easy to miss the humor and the wit, presenting the play as a shocking and grim parable.  But Beattie and the cast deliver on McDonagh’s tone marvelously.  It’s a play about child murders and yet, it may be one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had at the theatre.

The play finally comes down to stories (every character tells at least one during the course of the production), examining their power and influence.  Do stories really have the ability to change lives?  Katurian believes that stories shouldn’t be used to say anything – to make any kind of statement.  But even with his lack of purpose and direction, he finds that his stories have spoken to people, whether he intended them to or not.  So even if he didn’t kill those children, if his stories inspired their deaths, is he any less culpable?  And what about the stories themselves?  Will they live on after he goes?