“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” is perhaps our take-away from Martin McDonagh’s bitter-bitter black comedy of a fairy tale. It concerns Katurian (the indomitable Tom Story), a writer of bleak children’s stories (nearly all of them for his trunk), who is taken into custody by a pair of brutal Kafkaesque detectives when incidents in his tales begin, lethally, to come true. Most, but not all, of the ensuing violence happens in the mind or offstage. In the end, to protect his addled brother Michal (the engaging Aaron Muñoz), Katurian makes sacrifices of several kinds.
The grim outcome of this play is never much in doubt, and the work’s themes— the writer’s responsibility to his audience (Katurian tries vainly to convince that his stories are just that, that they don’t say anything), the tension between autobiography and creative invention, the preservation of his words after his death—are laid on a bit heavily at times. But the performances of Hugh Nees and Denis Arndt as the two policemen, a Lum and Abner of the Stasi set, are delectable. Nees, as the torturer Ariel, exchanges his customary teddy bear persona for one of clean-shaven malevolence; Arndt, as the so-called “good cop” Tupolski, squeezes out a deadpan sarcasm over a grit sandwich. Tupolski says, “I don’t have a world view. I think the world’s a pile of shit.”
Two of Katurian’s stories are reenacted with Taymoreseque wit by an ensemble of four, while he narrates, and after the second, we begin to think, enough with the stories, back to the plot. But Arndt/Tupolski redeems the trope with his own story, a drowned shaggy dog of a fourth-grade math problem he calls, “The Story of the Little Deaf Boy on the Big Long Railroad Tracks. In China.”
And unlike the best dark tales of Grimm, Lang, or Goose, the play leaves several loose ends. What significance does Katurian’s double name have for us? And why does Michal give Katurian the information that he does?
- The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, directed by Joy Zinoman, The Studio Theatre, Washington