Reflections on a Killer

Friday night I saw Killer Joe, Single Carrot Theatre’s production of the 1993 play by Tracy Letts. Let me begin by stating that this was probably the finest production of a play I have seen from the Carrots—from start to finish and on every level, the work was brave, uninhibited, and riveting. (See Daniel Collins’s review for details—I second every word of praise he has for the cast and crew.)

But Killer Joe is the kind of play that demands this kind of work. Full-frontal nudity, fresh bleeding wounds, rape both physical and emotional in a theater scarcely bigger than the squalid trailer in which the story unfolds—you don’t sign up for such things if you’re not willing to be brave and uninhibited. At the end of the night the actors get to take a deep breath, soak up the applause, and walk offstage, justly proud of their efforts in the service of brave, uninhibited art. But the audience they leave behind … what is left for us?

Very little of value, if the general response in the theater last Friday was any indication. And here’s where things get complicated. For much like its eponymous villain, Killer Joe ultimately seems to have no purpose but to shock, torture, and degrade. Director Giti Jabaily writes in the program, “The show … has universal resonance,” rooted in “common familial difficulties.” Yet the predominant sound I heard from the audience throughout that final, brutal, marathon scene was laughter. Perhaps it was uncomfortable laughter, perhaps it was genuine—for taken out of context, much of the dialogue is genuinely funny. Whatever the cause, the effect is the same—not universality but extreme particularity, not common identity but distance.

If you saw the play and you disagree, if your response to the characters sprang from someplace nearer to their plight, by all means please write and tell me. But I do not see how one could identify with anyone onstage for that final scene, when human beings, however fallen, however despicable, are forced to endure bottomless humiliation and reduced to their basest impulses—I do not understand how one could both identify with them and laugh at them, however uncomfortably.

On the contrary, to laugh in the face of such cruelty is to reassure ourselves that we are not like those people, that we would never find ourselves beside them, for surely we are smarter, kinder, better. By laughing, we free ourselves to reenter the world outside the theater more secure of our place in it—and, I would argue, less likely to look with sympathy the next time we encounter our wretched brothers and sisters in the newspaper or on the television or street corner.

If we are not better for having suffered through such horrors, then to what purpose did we suffer them? Understand, I am not claiming that such stories should not be told or that “this kind of thing” doesn’t happen. As Jabaily writes, “the disquieting reality is that it does happen, and not just in trailer parks in Texas, but in communities across the country and the world. It really happens.” And so we should proclaim it, to all who will listen, proclaim it to the world, in documentaries, in articles and nonfiction books—but to do it on the stage in the form of a play requires more empathy and craft than Tracy Letts proves capable of.

For despite the play’s intriguing premise and skillfully executed set-up, in the end Letts is guilty of the laziest kind of writing, and the final moments of Killer Joe resolve nothing. I don’t simply mean on the most basic level of plot, but on every level—Letts takes us to the edge, hurls us over, and then abandons us with the announcement that the saint-like daughter is pregnant, and the psychopath is the father. Gasps all around. Blackout. And we find ourselves not at the end of the play but smack in the middle of a new one.

Soap operas end this way, not plays—at least, not plays that purport to tell us something about human nature. And with this realization, the lie at the heart of Killer Joe is revealed—this is no gritty expose of “real life” horrors, but an insulting cop-out, the final manipulation calibrated to provide maximum shock and to explain nothing, as though the playwright had turned away with a shrug: “I don’t know how to end this story, so just fill in the blanks yourself.” Meantime we walk away, too dazed and distanced to attempt it. And even if we could, even if we were able to shoulder the writer’s burden and end his play for him, the question remains: Would we want to? Or are we just grateful to put it all behind us?

 

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