The Pillowman: Once Upon a Time...

The first--or only--job of a storyteller, a writer named Katurian K. Katurian declares in Martin McDonaugh's grisly and darkly comic thriller The Pillowman, is to tell a story. But, as a very wise man once wrote, "Careful the things you say: Children will listen."

In the play, someone has listened too closely to Katurian’s most violent stories, and has made them come true in the most horrifying ways imaginable. With this setup, the play asks some unanswerable questions: How much responsibility does a storyteller bear for other people's interpretations of his writing--and how much obligation does a writer have to tell the truth about his own experiences, thoughts and imagination? And even worse: If great suffering can inspire great art, is it worth the pain?

In Astoria Performing Arts Center's excellent revival of the play, directed with equal measures of driest wit and bleak morbidity by Tom Wojtunik, the unnamed totalitarian state in which Katurian lives is the kind of place where fairy tales are necessary for survival. The surreal reality of this world is so unrelentingly bleak that conjuring fantasies is the only way to remain sane. Watching these most twisted fantasies become real is at once so bizarrely hilarious and insidiously creepy that it's hard to know whether to laugh or shudder. (It is possible, however, to do both at the same time.)

As Katurian, Avery Clark is the very personification of reason and rationality, which makes the horrifying stories he tells all the more unnerving: If someone so cool, so collected, so normal could come up with these fantasies, what would spring from a truly disturbed mind? Nathan Brisby offers an answer as Katurian’s mentally challenged brother, aptly mixing sweetness with the twisted logic of the insane. Seth Duerr, as Detective Tupolski, revels in a different kind of twisted logic, one with which George Orwell would be very familiar. His cool, calculated delivery is as refined as it is chilling, and his chemistry with Clark is wonderfully intense. Richard D. Busser’s Ariel, the “bad cop” in a world of bad cops, nicely finds the humanity under his character’s bravado and bluster, making him one of the most sympathetic people in the story. In the smaller roles of characters in Katurian’s stories, Karen Stanion, Justin Herfel, Anthony Pierini and Jordan Bloom pantomime much of their performances, adding an extra layer of surreality that never goes over the top, but always comes just close enough.

Stephen K. Dobay’s multi-layered and effective set makes excellent use of APAC’s small stage, keeping the “real” scenes in front and the “story” scenes behind scrims on a platform—keeping fantasy and reality in the same space, but decidedly apart. Driscoll Otto’s lighting enhances the mood of every scene without overwhelming it, and Ryan Homsey’s atmospheric music also contributes nicely to the overall tone.

In short, there is very little in this production that doesn’t work brilliantly, proving that terrific theater can be found even further off Broadway than one might suspect. Those who quake at the thought of leaving Manhattan for a show will be in for a pleasant—or, rather, quite unsettling—surprise if they make the trek out to Astoria.