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Playhouse offers superbly acted ‘Pillowman’
YOUNGSTOWN
The titular Pillowman in Martin McDonagh’s award-winning 2004 play is a 9-foot-tall apparition composed of downy pink pillows whose life’s mission is persuading children to commit suicide, thereby escaping the eventual horrors that await them in adult life. It’s a striking vision, rife with poetic metaphor, and the heart of this rewarding, albeit supremely unnerving adult drama.
Mary Ruth Lynn’s superbly acted production of “The Pillowman” that opened Friday night at the Youngstown Playhouse is a rare instance of a local theater company tackling a challenging contemporary piece that makes zero concessions to the peanut gallery. With such tricky material — McDonagh elegantly ricochets between gallows humor and heart-rending emotionalism — the risks were manifold.
Yet Lynn and her brave cast, comprised of some of the area’s finest actors, manage to avoid the potential minefields, striking a delicate tonal balance that brought an SRO audience to their feet. Curtain calls (particularly on opening nights) are easy, but Lynn’s “Pillowman” truly merited its huzzahs.
Set in an unidentified totalitarian state that reeks of Communist- era Eastern Europe, the story revolves around the grueling interrogation of short-story writer Katurian K. Katurian (John Cox) by a pair of hard-nosed cops.
Tupolski (David El’Hatton) comes across as a wry quipster, while the younger Ariel (Jason Green in a striking change of pace from his usual musical-comedy roles) has the volcanic intensity of a feral dog. Because Katurian initially has no idea why he’s been arrested — perhaps it has something to do with the unintentional political subtext of his stories — he’s as guileless as a lamb being led to slaughter.
But as the true reason for his relentless grilling soon becomes apparent (a recent series of brutal child killings bear striking similarities to his fictional works), panic quickly sets in. The fact that Katurian’s mentally challenged brother Michal (Johnny Pecano) is being held — and apparently tortured by the sadistic Ariel — in an adjoining room only amps up the writer’s already considerable paranoia and terror.
Interspersed throughout the play are recitations of Katurian’s hauntingly creepy tales (my favorite was “The Little Jesus Girl” that opens Act Three) illustrated by Lisandra Stebner’s wonderfully stark, evocative, stick-figure-like drawings.
As the truth is gradually peeled away and the backstories of the characters — including Ariel and Tupolski whose identification with the Katurian brothers becomes strikingly, horrifyingly apparent — are filled in, the play reaches a crescendo of almost unbearable poignancy.
The intensely physical performances of the four principals (young Lauren Cline makes a brief but memorable appearance at the end of the play) are astonishingly effective and — a warning to the squeamish — brutally convincing.
(Poor Cox spends so much time being battered and bruised in the opening act that you start worrying about his well-being.) Pecano delivers the most authentic portrayal of a handicapped individual since Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar-nominated turn in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape:” he’s simply extraordinary. Cox brilliantly takes you inside the tortured psyche of his messianic character, Green displays previously untapped depths of feeling that mark him as a dramatic actor of remarkable promise in local theater circles and the mercurial El’Hatton — whose sardonic Tupolski supplies the evening’s biggest laughs — proves once again that he can do anything. (At times, Tupolski seems like a distant relation of El’Hatton’s Charlie Fox from last fall’s Oakland Center for the Arts production of “Speed-the-Plow.”)
If “The Pillowman” is an example of what awaits area theatergoers in 2011, this is going to be a year to remember.
“The Pillowman” runs through Saturday at the Youngstown Playhouse. For reservations, call 330-788-8739.