Review: Killer Joe by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
I knew that this one was going to scare us to death. I didn't get there early in the run but I saw that the reviews were popping up in the media and on line.
My rule is not to read the reviews until after I've seen the production and written about it. My ticket was for last Thursday night.
Thursdays are often down-time for Austin theatre, but this show was packing 'em in. There's no standing room in the pinched quarters of the Hyde Park Theatre, so the staff might have been turning some folks away. Something was going on here, for sure.
Killer Joe.
I admired the production but I despised the script.
There's a perpetual tension in theatre programming between those who want theatre to keep people happy and those who want theatre to make people think. Hyde Park Theatre programming is typically 'way over to the "make 'em think" side of the scale. The needle bumps up from time to time to the region figuratively inscribed with the French slogan "épater les bourgeois," translated approximately as "scandalize the conventional citizens." Or, more crudely, "Knock their socks off!"
Capital T Theatre tells this story with actors who are charismatic and dedicated to their craft. Director Mark Pickell sets the pace, knows when to apply the garotte of suspense to his audience, and isn't afraid of using silence. Brief moments or scenes of nudity are carefully calculated, appropriate, and delicately staged. There is a long, deliberate build to the action, and we grip our chairs muttering that Star Wars koan, I've got a bad feeling about this. . . .
Brooding unhappily over this show for the past four days, I gradually came to the conclusion that playwright Tracy Letts has produced an exercise in degenerate art. By that I mean a narrative that takes as its focus a group of moral and physical degenerates, characters so benighted that the audience feels a sense of smug superiority.
Letts paints this bunch of trailer-park trash as less than human. He encourages us to laugh at their blind materialism, their uncleanliness and their complete lack of loyalty, family sense, morals, civic responsibility and religion. These folks bust every one of the Ten Commandments, and not a one of them can understand anything more than immediate gratification of appetite. Letts sets them up to tear one another apart. Watching this production is like watching a dog fight.
The Smiths live in a double wide somewhere in a trailer park near Dallas: hulking, TV-addicted Ansel, his strutting slutty second wife Sharla, and Ansel's simpleton twenty-year-old daughter Dottie. Ansel's son Chris, an inept drug-dealer, is desperate for money to reimburse a violent middleman for lost cocaine. He proposes to hire a professional killer -- Detective Joe Cooper -- to do away with Ansel's first wife, mother of Chris and Dottie. Half the $50,000 in insurance will go to simpleton Dottie, so the Smiths can pay off his $6,000 debt.
When Kenneth Wayne Bradley as Killer Joe arrives for the discussion, only poor dim Dottie is at home. We get the full magnetism of those burning eyes of his. He is courteous, kind and attentive to Dottie, establishing for us the ironic premise that in a world of degenerates the killer is the most moral of them all. Melissa Recalde as Dottie has the wide-eyed guilelessness of a four-year-old, and the killer is charmed by her.
Negotiations, macho posturing, duplicity, misgivings, pandering, seduction, savage double-crosses, fellatio in conversation and in photos and then on-stage, murder off-stage, violence and manslaughter on-stage. . . and the audience was on its feet at the end, applauding, full of adrenalin and endorphins. They were particularly elated by Letts' final joke amidst the blood-letting, the one that turned the killer into a big, incredulous softie.
These are some of Austin's most talented and attractive actors, Capital T is a new and imaginative assembly, Hyde Park Theatre is one of my favorite venues, and I singled out director Mark Pickell for ALT applause for an earlier production.
The script of Killer Joe is manipulative, sardonic and demeaning both to men and to women. It is not pornographic, although others might have a different opinion on that point.
More than 50 years ago while grappling with the issue of free speech and obscenity, the Supremes crafted a definition.* In 1957 they found that to be qualified as "obscene" a thing must be prurient in nature (i.e., marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire), must be completely devoid of scientific, political, educational or social value, and must violate local community standards.
That definition didn't stand, of course. But it sounds about 80 percent correct for the script of Killer Joe.
So now I get to go read all those reviews of it, listed below. Seven of them, Plus an audio feature on KUT.
Review by Ryan E. Johnson for Examiner.com, August 2
Comments by Michael Barnes on his "Out and About" blog at the Statesman, June 21
Review by Spike Gillespie at the Austinist.com, June 20
Comments by Stacy Lynn, on-line, June 19
audio feature at KUT's Arts Eclectic with Michael Lee (2 min.)
Review by Sean Fuentes at AustinTheaterReview.com
Review by Rob Faubion at AustinOnStage.com, June 13
Review by Javier Sanchez at the Daily Texan On-line, June 8
Review by Avimaan Syam at the Austin Chronicle, June 10
Review by Clare Croft published at Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, June 8
EXTRA
Click for program of Killer Joe by Capital T Theatre
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Killer Joe
by Tracy Letss
Capital T Theatre
