The Pillowman
Wilma Theater
265 S. Broad St.
Until Nov. 5th, Times Vary, $38-50, $10 student rush
(215) 546-7824
www.wilmatheater.org
The Pillowman is a tapestry of twisted fairy tales. It's what you would get if Hansel and Gretel went noir or a world-wearied Rapunzel smoked two packs a day. In Jiri Zizka's unnerving new production of Martin McDonagh's Tony-nominated play at the Wilma Theater, The Pillowman's essential qualities of pathos and innocence lost persist, but so too do no small measure of dark humor and even darker whimsy.
Katurian (Saxon Palmer) is a writer living in your standard, everyday, unspecified totalitarian regime. As a person, he's nebbishy, but as an author, he's self-aggrandizing, the kind of person who might say that each one of his 400 short stories contains a little piece of his soul. This is especially disturbing considering the content of these stories, the lion's share of which detail ingeniously macabre murders of children. In the titular story, for example, a huggable man made of pillows acts as a sort of warped Grim Reaper, preemptively seeking out kids who will lead terrible adult lives and softly putting them out of their misery.
As the play begins, detectives interrogate Katurian in a stark jail cell; a recent string of children's deaths have rendered his stories apparently not so fictional anymore. Detectives Tupolski (a glib Lewis J. Stadlen) and Ariel (a belligerent Michael Pemberton) play good cop/bad cop while, in the playwright's wink to the audience, Katurian repeatedly claims that the content in his stories has no meaning beyond entertainment. We can't be sure who's telling the truth, and when we learn Katurian's simple-minded brother Michal (Peter Pryor) sits in the room next door, he's yet another character we can't quite trust.
The play's strongest suit comes in its stylized reenactments of Katurian's stories - mommies, daddies and kiddies made up to look like toys pantomiming on dollhouse-like sets. The conclusion of each individual story only brings us deeper into the folds of the larger mystery, the connection between Katurian's stories and the murders. It's fitting then that we learn more about Katurian's origins as a writer (not surprisingly, a screwed up childhood was involved) in the context of, well, another fairy tale. Zizka's production plays upon the basic human fascination with stories, and their inevitable devolution from neat packages to ambiguity with our own maturation.
The plot careens toward the mystery's conclusion in a fashion that both stops and breaks the heart. In the end, all questions are answered, and we find ourselves hoping that stories can endure for posterity, even a totalitarian posterity. Through it all, this production gets at the question, and it's a big one, of what it really means to tell a story.
