Playwright: Martin McDonagh
At: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted
Phone: 312-335-1650; $20-$60
Runs through: Nov. 12
By Jonathan Abarbanel
Those familiar with the plays of Martin McDonagh—The Beauty Queen of Lenane, The Lonesome West, The Cripple of Inishmaan—will be astonished by McDonagh's radically different voice in The Pillowman. Although written within the same brief time span as the other plays—when McDonagh was in his 20s—he leaves his usual rural Irish setting far behind to conjure an Eastern European police state. Echoing not Synge, O'Casey and Friel, McDonagh this time calls up the deeply satiric and legitimately paranoid spirits of Franz Kafka and, above all, Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian writer persecuted by Stalin.
McDonagh's hero is Katurian K. Katurian, the obscure author of 400 unpublished short stories—mostly horrific fairy tales about kind children who meet brutal ends. Only one of Katurian's stories has been published, but it's enough to land him in deep shit with the police when gruesome child murders parallel his tales. Katurian is the sole caretaker for his older, mentally slow brother who also is subjected to intimidating interrogation, if not the torture Katurian suffers. Eventually the killer confesses and meets justice of a sort, and the good cop and the bad cop reveal secrets that emotionally link them to Katurian and his literature. In Kafka-like fashion, the play reveals itself in layers, in stories within stories and plays within the play, leaving the audience's grasp of reality dangling. Scenic designer Loy Arcenas provides a stage within the stage for the purpose, and a bland portrait of the dictator that channels political satirist George Orwell in a fine joke.
Superbly directed by Amy Morton—who's emerged as one of Our Towns' best—and acted with wanton theatrical relish and verbal dexterity by Jim True-Frost ( Katurian ) , Michael Shannon ( his brother ) , Tracy Letts ( good cop ) and Yasen Peyankov ( bad cop ) , The Pillowman is a cruel, cold play about ugly people. It's crafted with a tremendous sense of language—hey, that's McDonagh's Irish heritage—and a dazzling sense of macabre fancy, yet not one of its four passionately dangerous principal characters really is likeable, much less embraceable. The play delves deeply into imaginative force as a shaper of character, into manipulation of perceived reality ( by Katurian's parents and by the police ) and into storytelling as solace and psychodrama. One certainly understands Katurian and admires the sacrifice he is prepared to make so that his stories might live, but that doesn't make him pleasant. He is, in fact, a murderer, although not of children—or is he? H
ow much influence does the storyteller have?
Uncomfortable to watch, and rather longer than it needs to be ( McDonagh's fault, not Steppenwolf's ) , The Pillowman nonetheless is perversely absorbing and intellectually challenging. There is no comfort in McDonagh's bleak world. Young or old, no one gets out alive.