The American family, reduced
Why Killer Joe is the best show in town
Tracy Letts became famous in 2007 as the author of August: Osage County, a long play about an American family behaving badly. It was not his first play. That had happened in 1990, when he wrote Killer Joe, a short play about an American family behaving even worse. He got it right the first time, and the Coal Mine Theatre’s superb production is here to prove it. It’s the best show in town.
August: Osage County was a rambling play in which the author dealt with any halt in the action by pulling yet another skeleton out of the extended family closet. Killer Joe, by contrast, is concentrated. It pursues a single story and squeezes every drop of juice out of it.
The characters in Killer Joe are mostly at the extremes of poverty, and it’s economic desperation as much as anything that drives them. We’re in the Texas trailer home of Ansel Smith and Sharla, his second wife. Crashing back into their lives comes Chris, Ansel’s son by his previous spouse. Chris owes a lot of money to drug dealers and has no hope of repaying it. But he has a scheme for raising the cash: have his mother killed and collect on the insurance. Everybody thinks this a good idea: Ansel, Sharla, and even Chris’s sister Dottie who is mentally somewhat damaged, probably due to their mother’s active neglect when she was a baby.
Everybody’s blithe acceptance of the murder plan smacks of the kind of glib black comedy in which unspeakable things are discussed in the most casual of tones. But the play works its way past that, courtesy of its title character. Killer Joe Cooper, the man hired to do the deed, is a law- enforcement officer with a lucrative sideline as a hit-man. Asked if he ever finds himself investigating a death for which he is himself responsible, he replies that he does and that no, it isn’t awkward, it’s convenient. Joe has a normally ironclad rule about requiring payment up front, which the Smiths of course cannot provide. But on this occasion he agrees to accept a retainer. The retainer is Dottie.
Letts is quoted in the program as having been inspired by Hollywood film noir, and the plot- line does suggest a down-market Double Indemnity. But the genre that comes most to mind is Southern Gothic: Cormac McCarthy and especially Tennessee Williams. When Joe comes to claim his collateral, he arrives for a dinner-date with Dottie, bearing flowers no less; it’s like a crazy-house version of the encounter between Laura and her Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie. The upshot is predictably carnal; less predictable, though not altogether unexpected, is that Dottie and Joe become fond of one another. That’s a complication.
So, even more, is the fact that Chris comes to regret the deal. He really loves his sister; the relationship may not be technically incestuous, since at curtain- rise Dottie is still a virgin, but it certainly has overtones. Chris wants Dottie to skip town with him. The play pivots on the contrast between Joe, immovable, and Chris, wavering. Both are terrifically embodied here. Matthew Gouveia is a brilliantly twitchy Chris, a character who starts out full-blown despicable and then gains our sympathy, maybe even our respect. Matthew Edison makes a stylish, lanky, drawling Joe, both menacing and charming, like the dark twin of the Gary Cooper whose surname he shares, surely not a coincidence.
The Smiths, by a similar token, could be an American Every family reduced to its barest essentials. They are all vividly played: Vivien Endicott-Douglas’ Dottie, a tough waif; Paul Fauteux’s Ansel, a vacillating husk; Madison Walsh’s Sharla, bold and with her own secrets that help precipitate the play’s tumultuous conclusion. All the characters have to choose between love and business, and we’re kept wondering which way each of them will jump.
It’s funny as well as scary, and Peter Pasyk’s production is in total control of mood, timing and action. Steve Wilsher has arranged maybe the most ferocious stage fights I’ve ever seen, the scarier for happening in such confined quarters; Patrick Lavender’s set makes constructive and imaginative use of every inch of space, down to the theatre’s own washroom. Christopher Stanton designed the sound, whose most memorable feature is the savage barking of the family’s dog, kept chained, we presume, in the trailer-park outside.
I f / Then is a musical, brought from Broadway, about the road you didn’t take, contrasted with the one you did. In my innocence, I’d imagined that each act of the show would outline a different path, with perhaps some reconciliation at the end. In fact, though, the two strands alternate throughout the evening, which I suppose is more daring but is also confusing.
Our protagonist, Elizabeth, comes back to New York from a failed marriage in Arizona, hoping for some kind of career in urban planning. She goes to Madison Square, planning to meet up with an old, male friend and/or – the syntax is catching – a new, female one. One invites her to a protest, the other to hear some music. Which invitation she accepts will determine her future. One will lead her to a highpaying, high- flying city job, the other to teaching and a second marriage, ill- fated in a different way from her first, but with a couple of children. The same people figure in both trajectories, which makes them difficult to keep straight. We are offered a few signposts – Elizabeth is known either as Liz or Beth, she does or does not wear glasses. I was faced with my own existential problem: was my lack of interest due to my inability to follow both stories, or could I not follow them because I wasn’t interested? Probably it’s both. The show never stays in one emotional place long enough for us to become invested in it.
The show is the work of the team who wrote Next to Normal, a show that had slightly more going for it. Tom Kitt’s music is featureless contemporary wallpaper. Brian Yorkey’s book has the odd sharp line, and it’s possible that his lyrics may as well; it’s hard to tell because the sound-level is pumped up into oblivion. This isn’t just a mechanical thing; much of it is down to Jackie Burns who plays Liz/ Beth. Whenever emotion seems indicated, which is often, she doesn’t so much sing as bray. Like Idina Menzel, who created the role(s) on Broadway, she has done time in Wicked, a show that pioneered the idea that volume equals passion, especially for leading ladies. There are quieter, and thereby better, performances from Matthew Hydzik as an army medic who picks Elizabeth up, several times, and marries her; from Toronto favourite Darren A. Herbert as a boss with both professional and personal designs on her; and from Anthony Rapp as the old college chum who, given the show’s structure, might be described as a bisected bisexual: he’s gaily married in one plotline, the heroine’s part- time lover in another.
One of the more effective numbers concerns her, and our, uncertainty as to which of these three men is in bed with her. The direction is by Michael Greif, who has been known to do better; choreography, consisting of aimless street-moves, is minimal and annoying.
Killer Joe runs through April 24 at the Coal Mine Theatre, Toronto; If/ Then through May 8 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
WE’RE KEPT WONDERING WHICH WAY EACH OF THEM WILL JUMP.