INTERROGATED: Mad Horse's Verbal Kint. |
| The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh | Directed by Andrew Sokoloff | Produced by Mad Horse Theatre Company | at the Portland Stage Company’s Studio Theater | through February 24 | 207.730.2389 |
“Once upon a time” is how it starts. Upon this Michal (Peter Brown) insists. He knows how a story goes, having heard so many told so often, all his life, by his younger brother and guardian Katurian (Dave Currier). Katurian also knows something about a story, having since childhood written more than 400 of them. And similarly confident about how a story plays out are police detectives Tupolski (Brent Askari) and Ariel (Craig Bowden). They are trying to solve the story — that is, the case — of two horrific child murders, and have taken Katurian and Michal in for interrogation. In a land far, far away, unnamed and totalitarian, this is how their entangled stories start. How they variously pervert, illuminate, and redeem each other is the concern of Martin McDonagh’s brilliant The Pillowman, in a gripping production by the Mad Horse Theatre Company.Most stories share certain elements — conflicts and motivations, metaphors and refrains, reveals and resolutions. Katurian’s stories happen to tend toward toes hacked from children's feet and razor-blades hidden in apples. And it happens that some of these dark elements, told by Katurian and heard so often by the brain-damaged Michal, align damnably with the details of Tupolski and Ariel’s forensic narrative. The conflict, then, concerns competing strains of story: Whose is true? Better? Complete? The Pillowman careens through a variety of stories — fairy tales, interrogations, confessions, readings, recollections — and explores what mischief can pass between teller and listener.
Director Andrew Sokoloff’s staging makes the stylistic shifts tense, comic, and creepy. The interrogation scenes, in a rough, gray, windowless room with a filthy floor, involve Mamet-loads of terse obscenities and intimidation in the good-cop/bad-cop routine of Tupolski and Ariel. In these roles, Askari and Bowden fashion sharp archetypes — the former dripping with laconic condescension, the latter barking and pacing like a pissed-off beast.
At other points, breaking into the interrogation room as if into the subconscious (with excellent use of Venetian blinds-turned-scrim in Amber Callaghan’s simple, grim set), comes some disturbing back story about Katurian and Michal’s parents. Told by Katurian as a stylized, comic fairy tale of black slapstick, the tale makes ominous cartoon figures of Lisa Muller-Jones and James Herrera, who look like they stepped out of an Edward Gorey scene (their excellent costuming is by Christine Louise Marshall). And still other stories are told in a realistic mode, as when Katurian and Michal affectingly refrain and strain at their long-held fraternal roles of storyteller and listener.
As we reel through all these tellings, the twists and reveals of the play become many and vertiginous; everyone’s archetypes begin to crack, subvert, and melt into each other. This is when the script begins to show the subtle intelligence beneath all the clamor, when the slack pacing of this production’s first act tightens, and when the Mad Horse actors reveal the depth and nuance of their characterizations. Brown’s Michal has layers that may well haunt you post-show, and both Bowden and Askari show their cracks with measured poignancy. Currier’s troubled writer ranges between the various renditions of his stories; and special laurels go to the ethereal and very young Veronica Druchniak, as one of his characters, who is fluent in some uncomfortable enactments.
