'Pillowman' at the Wilma (first review)

The lighter side of police brutality

LEWIS WHITTINGTON

Oscar Wilde believed that, in the scheme of things, “All art is quite useless,” even though he would rabidly defend all matters aesthetic, no matter how scandalous, ghastly or debauched. Wilde’s artistic descendant, the Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, proves both points in his complex play The Pillowman.

Pillowman is much more than a black comedy. This is a forensic drama that mocks its own convolutions, as well as a scabrous satire of cultural violence.

The Irish story-telling tradition is celebrated in the protracted extreme: It’s maliciously depicted onstage yet ultimately provides a redemptive purpose. (How bored do you suppose Oscar Wilde would be today with our cultural smorgasbord of graphic violence posing as literature and drama?)

In McDonagh’s world, allegories eat metaphors in torturous illusions, both literally and figuratively. Instead of leaving his audience in the absurdist theatrical air with pretensions of profundity (Pinter, anyone?), McDonagh displays the artistic guts to write an actual denouement, a rarity in itself.

Tupolski and Ariel, a detective and cop for an undisclosed “totalitarian” state, try to solve the torture murders of three children. Their prime suspects are Katurian, a slaughterhouse worker and unpublished storywriter, and his slow-witted brother, Michael. The police discover a pile of Katurian’s fictional stories that seem to describe the actual murders, some of which are depicted in ghoulish tableaus on the back wall of the stage.

It’s no small achievement these days to write a play that will lend itself to broad interpretations for actors, designers and directors. At more than two and a half hours, Pillowman borders on indulgences in both scene length and literary abstraction. Given its length, the one narrative disappointment is the setup of the cops working for a "totalitarian state," which is drawn only sketchily and ultimately just hangs in the air. This connection to the ritualized brutality was intriguing but failed to reach a satisfying resolution.

Nevertheless, iinventive production design and strong direction by Jiri Zizka keep McDonagh’s structural house of cards intact. The cast of eight is uniformly fine, all clearly committed to unpeeling and crafting McDonagh’s characters. Lewis J. Stadlen’s sly performance as Topolski— a cross between Groucho Marx and Regis Philbin— roils under a comedic surface without sliding into schtick. Michael Pemberton’s Ariel encounters more trouble defining dimensions convincingly as the “tough cop,” especially when his character’s flaws become part of the exposition.

Peter Pryor plays Michal as literally as he can, in this case the bravest choice, since the level of his mental capacity seems to change from scene to scene. The complex extended scene with the brothers in the same cell discussing the murders, with our sympathies between the brothers ping-ponged back and forth, is masterfully handled.

But it is Saxon Palmer’s full-throttle performance as Katurian that cuts to the bone of McDonagh’s acidic indictment of our cultural fascination with brutality and its darker connections to the human psyche. McDonagh’s abilities to keep changing the questions we ask to solve this mystery past prurience is a potent devise and Saxon’s performance keep the implications real. It’s no surprise that Palmer’s credits include not only TV’s “Law and Order” but Hamlet on stage.



For another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.