Art without innocence
By KAREN SHADE, 11/8/2006
The interrogation starts with Craig Walter (left), Brian Rattlingourd (seated) and Randall Whalen in Theatre Club's 'The Pillowman,' opening Thursday at the Nightingale Theater. KAREN SHADE / Tulsa World
If Hansel and Gretel could get away with pushing a woman into a potbellied oven inferno, Theatre Club’s “Pillowman” is pushing the idea that fables are not just for children.
Director Scott Heberling said the play by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is the kind of piece that works on the psyche of both its characters and audience.
“We made a choice early on just to never take for granted our audience, to try and always offer something that, in some way, was challenging — whether that be in the way it’s written, in what it says or whether that be something that is not often done,” he said.
The trial of the “Pillowman,” then, looms not only in its story about an investigation into a series of horrific murders, but in the questions of artistic responsibility and the response sure to follow.
The play, which opens Thursday night at the Nightingale Theater, takes place in a police interrogation room with a man wearing a blindfold and two detectives about to put this suspect through a traumatic wringer of questions and accusations.
The cops, Tupolski and Ariel, want to know who has been murdering local children. Their suspicions fall on Katurian, a writer whose imagination leans toward the macabre and whose stories seem to outline the exact methods used in the real killings.
The cops lean heavily on Katurian because most of his work is unpublished.
“Pillowman” was a hit when it opened at London’s National Theatre in 2003 before it jumped the Atlantic for a run on Broadway with Jeff Goldblum and Billy Crudup. It also won London’s Olivier Award for best play.
While it is not set in Ireland, like most of McDonagh’s work, the play carries other trademarks of the playwright, Heberling said.
“He’s got very strong dialogue, and all of his plays have a certain psychological factor. They often include characters who are very dark, manipulative, so the conflict within the plays is almost always a psychological conflict. . . . There’s usually an aspect of family and family gone wrong in some way,” he said.
Heberling directed two other McDonagh works for Tulsa theater: “Lonesome West” in 2004 and “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” at Heller Theatre in 2001.
He described McDonagh as having something between David Mamet’s ear for dialogue and Harold Pinter’s sense for the welltimed pause amalgamated and Sam Sheperd’s handle on surrealism and idealism. But McDonagh’s voice is distinctly his own.
If McDonagh’s works tend toward the dark, he said, there’s something even more strange in the undercurrent.
“They’re also very funny in a very dark way,” Heberling said.
“They’re actually hysterical at times, but the humor is derived from character. Often these characters are not the people you’d want with you every day.”
The playwright’s gift for planting humor amidst vivid descriptions of crime scenes might be likened to fairy tales: Traditional stories of princesses biting into poisoned apples or wolves devouring grannies while waiting for a snack-sized girl in a red-hooded cape.
Heberling said he wanted to bring out an aspect in the story that was both childlike and disturbing.
To do this, the character Katurian will read his stories — the ones emulated by the murderer. As he reads his highly descriptive and brutally revealing work, different sound effects and music will be played to emphasize the story elements.
“Normally in the script, stage directions are not so much written by the author as much as they are the original production notes,” Heberling said. “My experience with McDonagh, in the past, is he has breaks in each of his plays that do have long monologues or stories. . . . They aren’t acted out.”
Part of the decision to read the stories instead of acting them out also came out of his own concern for bringing young children into a show appropriate only for a mature audience.
“How far do you push a small child into something like this to create a piece of art?” Heberling said.
But he emphasized that no material has been removed from the production. Katurian’s stories are grisly and extreme, reasons the works would have been banned under censorship practices of the totalitarian rule depicted in the play.“
Conceptually, the piece has a lot of rough ideas. There are ideas of art and responsibility. There are ideas about how far you can go in storytelling before it . . . becomes a force. You’re watching something that plays out in the same way the argument in the play does,” Heberling said.
“How far can storytelling go and still be something that is innocent?” The play features Brian Rattlingourd, Craig Walter, Randall Whalen and Bryan Reed.
What:
drama presented by Theatre Club
When:
8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and Nov. 16-18
Where:
Nightingale Theater, 1416 E. Fourth St. Admission is $10. For reservations and more information, call 557-8012 or 583-8487 [As of February 2007, 633-8666].
Editor’s note:
Play is for a mature audience.