Interrogating Drama
By Caridad Svich
The Pillowman
By Martin McDonagh
The Booth Theatre
222 W. 45th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman
opens on the figure of a blindfolded man seated in a chair in
a nondescript interrogation room. After a silence, two detectives
enter. The familiar crime-genre scene of a detainee interrogated
by a good cop/bad cop team begins.
Information is doled out quickly. The detainee
is a mostly unpublished short story writer named Katurian (played
by Billy Crudup), who composes macabre fairy tales that are equal
parts Heinrich Hoffman and Stephen King. The low-level detectives
Tupolski and Ariel (played by Jeff Goldblum and Zeljko Ivanek)
work for a totalitarian dictatorship, and they have arrested Katurian
because his stories seem to have influenced three copycat murders
of young children. As the scene unfolds, we discover, as his screams
are heard from an adjoining room, that Katurian's slow-witted
brother Michal (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) has also been arrested.
The detectives cajole, taunt and terrorize Katurian in a witty
variation on familiar TV police drama.
In the twilit scene that follows, Katurian
tells the peculiar story of a young writer and his brother. Through
stylized peepshow re-enactments above and behind him, we witness
Katurian's parents decide to make their son into a successful
writer by subjecting him to the nightly screams of his older brother,
whom they torture repeatedly in extreme ways. When the child asks
about the screams, the parents deny them but encourage Katurian
to keep writing and use the strange "nightmares" to
fuel his imagination. When the young man finds out the truth,
he kills his parents and rescues his now brain-damaged older brother.
At this point the play shifts back to the
present, with Michal seated in a large prison cell listening to
Katurian's screams. The sadistic police are now torturing him.
The thread of violence, damage and abuse is what holds these brothers
together. Katurian is thrown into the cell with Michal, and they
confront the cycle of violent trauma that has destroyed their
lives. The piquantly disturbing irony is that this very cycle
has created Katurian's ability to spin haunting, if sensationalistic
stories, just as his parents had planned.
In this freewheeling, mostly legato scene
between the brothers--which particularly showcases Stuhlbarg's
affecting portrayal of Michal--McDonagh explores the alarmingly
suggestive power of literature and the psychological blur that
can occur between reality and fiction. The dark heart of the play
is contained in this scene, and if I don't divulge any more of
the plot, it's because the play depends in great part on the suspense
endemic to its thriller genre.
McDonagh's penchant for propping up his
plays by using the familiar frames of established genres is as
apparent here as it was in his acclaimed Leenane trilogy and The
Cripple of Inishmaan. Although The Pillowman starts
out as a tragically absurdist, self-aware policier reminiscent
of Kafka, it abandons itself to the more conventionally well-oiled
machinations of the thriller (emphasized by Paddy Cuneen's music
and Paul Arditti's sound design), even though the whodunit aspect
of the story is resolved relatively early on.
McDonagh and director John Crowley (who
also staged the play in its London premiere last season) set out
to expose the mechanisms of terror and desire that are intrinsic
to the genre, not only through the telling of Katurian's story
but also through the staging of some of his fictions throughout
the evening. Working expectations and reactions in cleverly astringent,
if sometimes overly indulgent, Tarantino-like maneuvers, McDonagh
and his talented artistic team toy with extreme comedy and violence
to arouse and discomfort their audience. While The Pillowman
is ostensibly about the power of literature and its inherent threat
to a censorious, dictatorial government, it is more about the
act of reading and viewing: how does a story affect us, and what
are the emotional triggers that draw us in in the first place?
McDonagh is a provocateur, and while there
is no denying his skill and guile as a dramatist working in a
popular form, there is something hollow at the heart of this play.
His chilly reserve is to be welcomed, and his strategies for laying
bare the erotica of violence, of sanctioned and unsanctioned sadomasochistic
pain and pleasure (echoes of Abu Ghraib), are effective. The play's
grander ambitions, however, which speak to key questions of how
societies are run and individuals are besieged by threats to their
imagination and free will, are less convincing. The prose style
and content of Katurian's stories, which are relayed often during
the evening as suggestive examples of twisted morality tales for
children (such as the Hoffman tales in Shockheaded Peter),
border constantly on the banal. The images of violence the stories
conjure are gruesome but not potent enough to resonate with any
profundity.
This may be indeed McDonagh's point: that
the stories we tell now in a media-saturated, violent world can
only be banal and lurid. But if we are to take his larger idea
seriously--that Katurian's stories are destined to outlive him,
that their power is too great to be dismissed--then the surface
banality of the stories is problematic. Trading in the language
of Grimm's fairy tales is not the same as reproducing their enduring
psychological weight and disturbance. Their primal element, and
the way they are embedded in our psyches almost like the myths
of ancient Greece, are not honored fully enough in McDonagh's
vision.
The cheapness of horror rather than its
essentially disruptive and liberating aspect seems to be what
McDonagh is after as a comment on our tawdry world. His emphasis
on telling the story through the eyes of trauma victims--as a
sort of confessional recovery--recalls the commonplace Jerry Springer-like
talk shows that have cheapened our national discourse, particularly
since 9/11. Unlike, for example, Sarah Kane's Blasted,
with which Pillowman shares major themes, McDonagh's
cathartic despair is intimated but never fully released. Although
he is extremely well served by his artistic collaborators (and
special mention must be made of Jeff Goldblum's razor-sharp wit
and Zeljko Ivanek's wiliness), as the evening unfolds the play
erases itself until we are left with the disconsolate image of
a fire burning: the Promethean fire of literature itself waiting
to be unleashed.
print version