Saturday, December 30, 2006

PIllowman Redux

I rewrote the Pillowman entry from last month. This is a little clearer and very slightly more succinct. Enjoy!


Evil, All Grown Up: Adults Choosing Evil in The Steppenwolf's Pillowman


“...answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? [Ivan Karamazov asked his brother.]”

“No, I would not agree,” Alyosha said softly.1

A brilliant young writer witnesses his brother being tortured by their parents. He frees his brother and cares for him. As they live together in the aftermath of the torture, the brilliant young man writes stories that, in various forms, represent the experience. In these representations he makes sense of the experience by attempting to answer certain questions: how could this have have happened? How could their parents have allowed and perpetrated this? Can any good come from this?

This is a simple restatement of the premise of The Pillowman. But it is also a restatement and clear distillation of the premise upon which the Hebrew bible was written and propagated. That premise has anthropological and religious roots in the period following the first Israelite exile in 586 B.C.E.

What had until then amounted to ancient Israel’s national life (anthropological customs, religion, etc.) was thrown into turmoil, following the Persian invasion and the exile of the nobility, as Persia administered government. This trauma caused profound suffering and upheaval for the Israelites who lived through it and its aftermath, in which Persia partially relinquished the conquest (they allowed the return of the nobility and the rebuilding of the temple). The priestly cult which had hitherto controlled religious life was undoubtedly undermined by new religious practices.

It is doubtful that, for the nobility, the experience was traumatic per se (the book of Daniel portrays the nobility—the priests and their families—living as guests amongst the court of the Persian king), but it was not easy, given certain trials and privations, and especially in light of what the nobility saw as their divine mandate. They witnessed Israel misdirected, religiously, from the path of the established religious norms (centering on the temple cult). Following their return, by 445 B.C.E., the Mosaic scripture (the five books of Moses, or Scriptural Torah) was collected and propagated. The priests were witnesses to the suffering of the population of Israel. What, according to Jacob Neusner (as a surveyor of Jewish history), was their response as witnesses? Literature (storytelling).2

According to Neusner, ancient Israelite religious and social life revolved around a few central principles. The priests collected ancient stories and built those stories around a simple narrative form: purity, exile, and redemption. This narrative form underpinned the central principles. The form is repeated throughout the Mosaic scripture, and it is a keen statement of the worldview of its creators, especially with respect to some of the young writer's questions: how could this have happened? How could God have allowed and perpetrated this? Can any good come from this?

They answered: God created a world in which man must be allowed to suffer as a condition of his eventual redemption. This narrative form both bolstered their orthodox view of Israelite life and recentered the Israelite world. While exile was not the personal experience of many Israelites, the Pentateuch's treatment of exile articulated many questions of identity that they faced.

The priests portray variations on their experience as a class in response to the suffering they have witnessed—they are a self-centered class of narrator-witnesses. The theme of a self-centered narrator telling stories to make sense of a relation's suffering recurs directly in The Pillowman. McDonagh casts Katurian in the role of the “self-centered priest-artist-chronicler” and his brother Michal in the role of “suffering everyman.” The Mosaic narrative structure is one of the most dominant in human history, and, like the priests who propagated it and the Israelite populace, it is key to Michal and Katurian, who uses and alters it as commentary on his experience.

Ivan Karamazov, quoted at the top, is similar to the priests and Katurian. He collects and chronicles stories of horrible abuses committed against children. He purposely narrows his theme to children, to heighten the starkness of the injustice. In this preoccupation he shares much with Katurian.

The “poem” (more a short apocryphal biblical story) that results from Ivan's years of preoccupation is The Grand Inquisitor. In it, Ivan undermines the basic Mosaic narrative form. Christ returns to earth in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition to comfort men in suffering (the exile part of the Mosaic narrative) and to aid in their redemption—i.e. to aid them in the process of enacting the narrative. A political leader, the Inquisitor, arrests and executes Christ, deciding for his constituents that the suffering that God allows as a condition of man's redemption is too abject. The Grand Inquisitor aims, as a terrestrial god, to lessen man's suffering, and refuses the redemption part of the narrative on man's behalf.

The Brothers Karamazov, writ large, takes on the related sufferer/witness to suffering theme, through a narrator chronicling a town's suffering over the course of several months in the late 19th century. Its story tends to respond to Ivan's treatment of the Mosaic narrative; it portrays, realistically, the suffering incurred by mankind as the result of spiritual freedom weighed against the basic human need for such a freedom, and its potential to regenerate mankind. Dostoevsky concludes, with a heavy heart, that the potential benefit of a world regenerated by a spiritually free, active love outweighs the manifest, horrible suffering necessarily incurred by mankind through such a freedom. He believes that it is impossible to sociologically reconstitute a world without suffering, and concludes that the struggle between these two extremes, freedom and suffering, is the divinely ordained struggle of creation. But he works within the framework of the Mosaic narrative structure to make this point.

The Brothers Karamazov states question of suffering versus spiritual freedom very politically, and in the post-enlightenment literary world, the political ramifications of this question were paramount. Today, this question takes on different forms, but thanks to the media's power to shape our view of reality, the aesthetic form of the question becomes the powerful political question.

Here's an example of such a question, directly related to a narrative we have just considered, related to the foundation of the State of Israel. It's fairly clear to anyone studying the history of the settlement of the modern State of Israel that the Jewish people largely acted out, politically, the narrative to which they as a people clung for two millenia. Now, did the Jewish people perpetuate the redemption narrative due to the existence of the narrative by itself or due to cultural norms that gave rise to the narrative? Or some mixture of the two?

The question of Israel's history is a pertinent restatement of a contemporary problem: what is the relationship between real world violence and violence in mass media? Do images of violence necessarily cause violence? And if so, what is the appropriate balance between artistic freedom and attendant human suffering?

Katurian, like Ivan, uses and undermines the Mosaic narrative throughout The Pillowman. But The Pillowman, writ large, portrays the distilled circumstances through which we receive basic stories considering theodicy and a balance between artistic freedom and suffering. In this portrayal, McDonagh, in collaboration with Amy Morton (the director of the recent Steppenwolf production), has created a stark, blistering work that, like The Brothers Karamazov, ultimately affirms the hope that mankind can balance artistic freedom (McDonagh’s brand of spiritual freedom in this piece) and its attendant necessary suffering, with a world redeemed from suffering. He shows us how artistic freedom plays out in the world, and he shows us the consequences and possibilities.

McDonagh gives life to the problem in the forms of Katurian K. Katurian (his full legal name; played by Jim True-Frost) his brother, Michal (Michael Shannon), and the detectives who have arrested them, Tupolski (Tracy Letts) and Ariel (Yasen Peyankov). To restate the action of the piece more elaborately: Katurian, an author of obscure short stories, and his brother, Michal, are arrested on suspicion of child murder. Michal confesses to having killed the children at the inspiration of his brother's stories. Katurian, in response, murders his brother in custody. Katurian agrees to confess to the murders of the children (although, in reality, he played no direct part in the murder of the children), as well as his brother and his parents (he did indeed kill his parents years before, in response to their abuse of his brother) as a bargain for the saving of his stories. He is then murdered by the police (the play is set in a fictitious totalitarian state where such police murder is commonplace), but his stories are saved.

The play is set with the stage from an old vaudeville or movie house, painted with gold foil, in the background. In the foreground is a vast police warehouse, with a portrait of the Fearless Leader (a Bashar Assad looking fellow), and flags on the wall. Great steel balconies suggestive of a steel mill run high up. There are old crates, old works of art, law books, and filing cabinets lining the floor, suggestive of the key Apollo and Dionysus dualism at the heart of the production—creativity and order, side by side. The relegation of law books to a warehouse is highly suggestive of our current questions related to rule of law with respect to enemy combatants. There is no house music. A great chandelier, suggestive of the old vaudeville, stares down at the audience from above.

I was a little disappointed that the totalitarian regime was so clearly suggested by the portrait. One nice thing about the Broadway production is how we as an audience were forced to piece together, like detectives, the nature of what we were seeing. The introduction of the totalitarian state and its implications happened at McDonagh's pace—unfolding grimly, yet hilariously. Katurian is obsessed with staying apolitical as a writer, and with a portrait of Assad in the background, we know why. But without it, his protestations of disdain for politics resonate with our understanding of the Hollywood screenwriter or the big city cynic—i.e. archetypes we can readily associate with artists we know or know of.

The play opens to Katurian being led, blindfolded, into a dimly lit room from one direction. Then the detectives exit and reenter through another door, disorienting Katurian. Tupolski “demands” to know who left Katurian's blindfold on (when it was him), introducing him as the “good cop”. The lighting here actually delineated the boundaries of the detectives' office, suggestive of the countless interrogations we've seen in popular culture featuring a lamp shone directly over the suspect's head. Ariel proceeds to pull a lamp directly over Katurian's head here, completing the image, and introducing him as the “bad cop.”

The rhythmic scoring of the action from the police at the top was fantastically aggressive, intimidating, and disorienting. When Tupolski seeks intimacy with Katurian by joking about how he needs information to fill out a form (which he subsequently tears in half) the rhythm slows, and his tool for acquiring intimacy with the suspect is clear. When Ariel loses his temper at being told “he can draw his own conclusions,” the action ramps up to such a frenzy that we can feel Katurian's torture in our bones. We become intimidated and confused as the detectives rattle through details of Katurian's first story (of a little girl who carves little apple soldiers stuffed with razors) and of questions about visits in the “Jew quarter” (even in McDonagh's bizarrely representational alternate universe the Jew is the other and is corralled into a ghetto). As Katurian learns that his brother has been arrested, his panic raises his rhythm from laconic to frenzied.

It would be easy for a production of this play to simply allow the storytelling that takes place to transpire at a haphazard pace. In this production, the pacing is concerted: stories are told at a wonderfully simple yet unsaccharine pace. As a result, the audience has time to make sense of Katurian's allegories. To wit: the little girl with apple soldiers. This story is key to how Katurian, despite his protests, makes sense of storytelling. An abused little girl with a crass, piggish father, carves little apple soldiers, stuffs them with razors, and gives them to her father as a gift, warning him to only admire them and not to eat them. He does eat them, however, and dies, choking on his own blood. Then, as the little girl sleeps, the soldiers invade her dreams and crawl down her throat, killing her. The story is, abstractly, a melding of Katurian and his brother's experiences. But it is clearly written from his point of view: the girl creates something deadly in response to abuse—we can imagine that she knows full well that her crass, gluttonous father will eat the apples. The deadly creation eventually kills her.

Of course, a story of abuse leading to destruction could certainly be Katurian's representation of Michal's experience. And later in the production, we see Michal, as a response to abuse, construct a creative action (acting out Katurian's stories, and this one especially) that will end destructively. Rather, I believe that this story is about creating works that depict violence and knowing that those depictions will result in real world violence. And as such, this story is Katurian's own personal and specific meditation on violence in art. The little girl's response to abuse is the creation of these deadly soldiers—and it eventually destroys both her abuser and herself.

As we hear the story of “Three Gibbet's Crossing”, (a caged man is shot without understanding why) we feel the rhythmic dissonance between Katurian and the detectives ease. They establish a banter. We hear another story, a midrashic interpretation of the Pied Piper story, in which a boy, who accepts his poverty and ostracization, and offers his measly sandwich (his only dinner) to a traveler who passes by. The traveller thanks him by chopping off his toes. It turns out that by crippling the boy, he has saved him from the fate of the other children of Hamlin, who will be led off by the Pied Piper, the traveler, later.

Soon, the air in the room depletes as we hear the sounds of Katurian's brother screaming next door. The rhythm crawls. And then the detectives strike, and the room throbs. There have been two children murdered, and there is a third missing. The two children were murdered in an apparent imitation of Katurian's unpublished stories, pointing the finger at him. The detectives want confessions. In a grim moment that caused the couple beside me to cringe, the detectives confront Tupolski with a box of toes that apparently comes from an imitation of the Pied Piper story. There is a certain staged quality here to Ariel and Tupolski's shtick, that becomes apparent as Tupolski implores Ariel not to feed the toes to Katurian. This is welcome comic relief.
Then, in a chilling moment, scored at a snail's pace, Ariel growls that “to kill a writer”, as they are planning to do, “sends a message. And that message is that YOU CAN'T GO AROUND KILLING LITTLE FUCKING KIDS!”

Katurian responds, with dignity, that he refuses to say another word without seeing his brother. Perhaps the potential for a prisoner's dilemma type of subterfuge has occurred to him. But the even dignity with which True-Frost delivers those lines clearly articulates the love that he has for his brother. He is left alone as Ariel goes to retrieve electrodes.

Here we see the giant vaudeville stage and the fabulous crystal chandelier slide out from the background, to the sound of a foghorn. In a play about art, it is appropriate that this production, a work of theater art, emphasized the theatrical aspect, by making the vaudevillian stage a centerpiece. Katurian addresses us as a spotlight follows him (perhaps echoing the vaudeville theme). And in a very astute choice, we see the story of Katurian and Michal's childhood unfold directly before us, on a stage near to the one on which the preceding action takes place, suggesting, implicitly the equality between the two tales. On Broadway the action of Katurian's past unfolds on a balcony high above the stage, behind a scrim. In this production the story unfolds as near to us as everything that has transpired until now.

We learn the story of a boy writer, Katurian, showered with love and affection by his parents and recognized for his stories. As the boy matures, he begins to hear sounds of torture through the wall (akin to Michal's screams earlier). The screams through the wall are also suggestive of the Republic's allegory of the cave, in which the philosopher's job is seen as discourse on the nature of the shadows of formal reality that compose everyday life. In McDonagh's world, suffering is reality and the writer is the philosopher, whose job is to discourse on the shadows he witnesses thereof. Michal's experience is the direct opposite—he experiences the shadows of a joyous reality through the wall. Were Michal the storyteller, we can imagine that his stories would be inversions of Katurian's. In this world (as imagined by Morton), the sufferer and the witness are inversions of each other. They even (we learn later) look similar.

When the boy enters the room adjacent to his, he finds his parents have played a joke on him, with sounds that mimic suffering. Eventually, Katurian discovers that his brother is indeed being tortured. True-Frost as the nerdy writer is quirky, almost like an eccentric Crispin Glover persona here, in disturbingly describing, at a very even pace, the murder of his own parents, in response to the torture.

Katurian's story is Mosaic in nature; he lives idyllically, then suffers, then repents, then is redeemed. Michal's is directly opposite. He suffers, is saved, lives idyllically, then sins, then suffers.

The stage and chandelier retract, and we find Michal alone on stage. On Broadway, Michal was depicted as Katurian's eternal little brother; fat, childish, plaintive. Here, he is depicted as Katurian's doppelganger, physically. As we see him respond to the sounds of Katurian's torture through the wall, we recognize his responses as rather adult responses. He has stubble. He and his brother have petty squabbles, and just as any two brothers who are contemporaries have resentments, Michal resents Katurian—and we sense it immediately, even in the moment Katurian is thrown on stage. The brothers have a rhythmic rapport, and their interactions feel deeply rooted in their decades-old relationship. The rhythm of their interactions is the baseline for normalcy in the production.

Michal reveals that he told the detectives whatever they wanted to avoid torture. Michal jokes that he might blame the whole thing on Katurian. Michal's banter with here is akin to a petulant adolescent, not to the eight year old characterization presented on Broadway. He's not a savant, and he's not a child. He rather resembles a frat boy with tattered clothes. He begs to hear his brother's short story, The Pillowman, which Katurian tells at an easy pace.

That story is the allegorized rendering of a storyteller whose stories prompt his audience/subject (they are the same character) to self-destruction, and whose sometime failure initiates a story he tells himself, prompting his own self-destruction. The Pillowman's stories are all told to a child living in an idyllic scene in the past (echoing the Mosaic nature of Katurian's sense of personal narrative). The storyteller tells the child of the impending corruption of the future and the futility of living (these are future lonely suicides). The stories prompt the children to destroy themselves as children (and disguise the suicides as accidents) so as to spare themselves from the horror of the corrupted future. To the Pillowman, like Ivan, the suffering (exile) is too abject to expect people to bear. The Pillowman (somewhat like the Inquisitor) aids his wards by helping them to refuse redemption. The Inquisitor knowingly refuses a real redemption, where, for the Pillowman, there is none.

Finally, the Pillowman, by failing to convince a future rape victim to self-destroy as a child (the storytelling by True-Frost builds to a fevered crescendo), becomes despondent, and goes back to his own self as a child, and tells his child self the story of his future lonely suicide, and convinces his child self to immolate himself. As the grown Pillowman disappears, he hears the screams of the people whose childhood self-destruction spares them from a horrific future. We can imagine that he realizes, in horror, the relative selfishness of his suicide before he dies.

Herein is contained Katurian's message to himself as a storyteller: though my stories may incite self-destruction and pain, they are truthful, and in the end, more humane than a life of untrue illusion. The story is Katurian's affirmation of a miserable life as a chronicler of human suffering. It is also a larger affirmation of the ultimate value of the enterprise, so long as his stories (destructive, but true) survive. Humanity may destroy itself as a result of his stories, but Katurian's creative spirit believes that this is the best of all possible outcomes. Is this the underlying message of the play? I do not think so. As we will see, the self-centeredness of Katurian's narratives and the critical disposition of his readers are crucial to the picture outside of the specific short story of The Pillowman.

The story finishes. Michal confesses to having actually killed the boy by cutting off his toes. He did tell the police what they wanted to hear—but he also happened to kill the kids. Michal asserts that he killed because his brother told him to. (At this point several audience members left). Katurian accuses his brother of being a “sadistic asshole.” Michal has convinced himself of an informal critical theory. Art causes violence, and therefore I did violence. Michal has critiqued Katurian's work by killing in response. He points out that as a result of the murders, Katurian will become a famous writer, to which Katurian responds that the most likely outcome will be the destruction of the stories. He tell his brother he would rather be burnt alive, and have Michal burnt alive before having the stories burnt.

Michal is obsessed with his brother's stories—he wants his brother and the stories to be famous. Yet if he is sophisticated enough to act out murder to further that result, he is surely sohpisticated enough to realize that he will destroy his brother. As an adult in this production (and again, not as the Broadway production's child), he makes an adult choice, springing from complex motives. I'm convinced that, in this production, he hates and resents his brother, and at the same time, longs for his brother's success and the success of the stories.

Why? Every story in the play can be recognized as Katurian's meditation on his own suffering as a witness to his brother's pain or Katurian's meditation on his brother's pain itself. The relationship between the chronicler (the artist) and the subject forms the foundation of this Cain and Abel story, because the artist, Katurian, grasps for meaning from the suffering he has witnessed, and his brother makes sense of his own experience via Katurian's stories. As a result of Morton and Shannon's choice to characterize Michal as an adolescent, we see a being whose understanding of the world has taken shape as a teenager.

This makes sense. If Michal is the older brother, and is liberated from his parents' torture at, say, age eleven or twelve, we can safely assume that he is taught or learns to read (he can read) in the subsequent few years. He is socialized during those years and educated otherwise. But most importantly, he can come to hear and comprehend (for Shannon's Michal, as opposed to the Michal on Broadway, can comprehend) fully his brother's representation of the world in story.

There is deep resentment in the relationship. On Broadway, the relationship was portrayed as a George and Lenny relationship. That is to say: Katurian is in no wise Michal's peer. The resentment in the relationship, therefore, is of a child complaining before his God. Katurian, on Broadway, is the settled authority in the relationship, and Michal destroys him unknowingly, as a child might break an antique vase. In Morton's production, the two men contend with each other, as peers, even as Katurian plays God. There is resentment in Michal, but his resentment is proud and spiteful. If Katurian plays the role of Michal's God, then Michal is Katurian's Miltonic Satan, a tragic hero, an angel, who has come to see himself as a God.

This is a remarkable artistic statement from Morton. If Katurian is the artist speaking for God, delivering contemporary revelation through fiction, and Michal is a symbol of mankind, suffering uncomprehendingly, and deriving meaning and direction from story, then the portrayal of Michal becomes the director's meditation on the nature of mankind and his suffering. Forgiving the superficial elitism of McDonagh's casting of mankind as a Faulknerian idiot (at least great writers come by this elitist portrayal of mankind honestly), I feel that Morton does her best to present Michal less as an idiot than as a damaged adolescent genius. Michal is intelligent, angry, and most importantly, an adult.

In New York, mankind is portrayed from the ultimate parental elitist perspective: as a child. Recalling the stereotypical cultural elitism of New York's cultural and intellectual congonscenti, we might not find this all that surprising. Chicago's portrayal of man's contention in life is a dignified one, and one for which Morton should be proud. It cannot be emphasized clearly enough—portraying Michal as an adult was a masterstroke.

Soon after Michal's confession, we learn that the third, undiscovered, child was the victim of a reenactment of Katurian's story “The Little Jesus.” We can only imagine, in horror what that entails. Katurian reacts furiously at the idea of the reenactment of such a gruesome story. Actually, his reaction here was far more interesting than Billy Crudup's on Broadway. Crudup reacted instantaneously to Michal's revelation. In True-Frost, we actually see the information land and be processed.

Michal reassures Katurian that everything will be okay—and that they will “hang out in heaven.” When Katurian points out that child killers go to hell, and that it is most certainly a hell in which their parents' abuse is revisited on them, Michal loses control, flopping on the floor, at a frenzied pace, in an act of physical play that bespeaks Morton's mastery as a director of physically free acting. In the post-show discussion True-Frost mentioned that much of the physical acting was improvisational. In this moment of the production it was also moving.

All Michal has, he says, are Katurian's stories. We can imagine that he wants better stories. His beef is critical. But he has already accomplished what he set out to accomplish. It's all over but the shouting. He settles down for a nap—which, as he points out, is sensible, considering the torture that he may about to endure. Katurian points out that the torture may be unbearable, and in crystal-clear moment of Michal's resentment, Michal reminds Katurian that Katurian has no idea of the pain that Michal knows how to endure.

Then Michal demands to hear the story that he enjoys. This moment was timed perfeclty. It seemed that the tension in the piece became unbearable just before Michal made this demand. Another masterstroke from Morton—as the audience is getting uncomfortable, and might think to walk out to hear another story themselves (i.e. leave the theater at the impending intermission), Michal expresses the same sentiment.

Before Michal nods off, he begs to hear his favorite story, The Little Green Pig, which is as follows: The Little Green Pig liked being green—even though he was different, and ostracized by the other pigs. The farmer, noticing the difference, snatches the pig, and dips him in special pink paint that can never be painted over and never washed off. The little green pig is unhappy—his only claim to dignity has been painted over. Subsequently, a special green rain falls, making the other pigs green, and making the little green pig special again.

I believe that this is Michal's piece for a very good reason: it is the only one written exclusively from his own point of view. The pig starts out exceptional, but suffering. He is important even in pariahdom. He is then removed, and forcibly made to conform to the other pigs.

It is a story about someone exceptional in pariahdom who is then removed, from without, from that pariahdom and then made to conform. The pig's suffering is alleviated, but his sense of dignity is diminished. Then, as the rain falls, he realizes a new dignity. To me, this is the perfect meditation on Michal's experience from Michal's own perspective as the direct recipient of suffering, and not from Katurian's perspective as the witness to suffering. We can imagine a fourteen year old Michal hearing his brother's stories and making sense of the outside world (the other pigs) through them. Through his brother's stories, Michal's understanding of the world assumes that every child experiences suffering akin to Michal's prior to his salvation by his brother (i.e. is green just like the little green pig used to be).

Thus, Michal's understanding of the world is that his dignity (recognized retroactively, through the story) as a child, was a false dignity, because he was not truly exceptional in his suffering (i.e. his greenness). His new dignity, as one who has been saved from suffering, is true—the other pigs experience the biblical cycle of innocence corrupted and subsequent suffering (to be followed by repentance and redemption). Michal's dignity is as one whose torture ends as he enters maturity and whose redemption follows directly. Michal's experience is the direct inversion of the biblical narrative.

As he socialized following his grisly experience, the sense of alienation must have been profound. He sees Katurian as supremely powerful, and wonders why, given their equal innate intellectual faculties (they both come from the same sick genius parents), he was not given the power and the pleasure. He heard sounds of enjoyment behind that wall every bit as surely as Katurian heard suffering. In this production Michal both loves and hates his brother, and we understand the reasons. His love stems from the direct relief of his suffering initiated by his brother—his brother is the savior. His hate stems from his resentment at being the freak brother and from his critical distatste for his brother's portrayal (or lack thereof) of his life. He hates that the stories are arranged incorrectly or portray things inaccurately. And most horribly both to Michal (and we discover, Ariel) they incite people to violence—and this incitement may have led to his personal suffering. Michal hates the fact that violence in stories causes violence and he hates Katurian for perpetuating violence, through him and through others, like their parents. When Michal accuses Katurian of being “like them” (the parents) he equates Katurian's words depicting the tortures of hell with their parents' enactment of those tortures, setting the matter before the audience clearly. Words are deeds. They inspire others to violence and they inspired Michal, with his own critical permission, to it.

Inasmuch as Michal's experience is the inversion of Katurian's, it is appropriate that his actions lead to the destruction of the stories. Michal's act of destruction is the ultimate active inversion of his brother's act of creation, yet, interestingly, he rationalizes it as the means by which Katurian will become famous and through which the stories will survive.

Michal falls to sleep, and then, as Katurian did their parents, he smothers Michal with his pillow. As he does it, and Michal struggles and dies (at uncomfortable length), Katurian whispers, repeatedly, that “it's not your [Michal's] fault.”

This key moment, in New York, was portrayed as a mercy killing—of the smart brother sparing his idiot brother more torture. The idiot accidentally came across the wrong stories and now has to die for having acted them out. Better that his brother should do it. In this production, of course, the disagreement between the brothers is a critical one, and much darker. Katurian's murder, Cain slaughtering Abel, is all at once mercy, yes, but also revenge. Michal resented his brother and has destroyed him. Further, Katurian belives, his stories have been destroyed. And the stories call out “from the ground” for justice.

Katurian finishes the murder and goes to the door to announce his confession to six murders. He has only one condition—it concerns his stories. At those words, the lights go black and we head to intermission trying to make sense of 90 minutes of the most dense literary theater we have ever seen.

When intermission ended, approximately 20% of the Saturday night audience had defected—electing to hear other stories for the rest of the evening. As we enter, the chandelier is low and the vaudeville stage is out. We transition gradually into story time.

There once was a little girl who was convinced that she was Jesus. She had good parents and she went around acting Christ-like. Following one of her shenanigans, her parents are tragically beheaded in an auto accident (hilariously portrayed in shadow by Morton, and a bit of self-parody from Katurian and McDonagh). She is then transferred to horrible foster-parents who lied about their horribleness “on the form” (more comic relief). They abuse her horribly and goad her with her belief in her own divinity. They test her by putting her through Christ's trials and by crucifying her and burying her alive. The story ends to the sound of her scratching the top of the coffin.

As I recall, this story was also told, on Broadway, on the same balcony as Michal and Katurian's story. And it was told from behind a scrim, giving the audience comfort and safety in the distance and concealment of the acts. Again, in this presentation, the action is put right before us: we see the little girl lowered into the coffin, and we see her scratching at its top.

Of course, this is paralyzingly unpleasant, but the larger issue is not of how unpleasant we feel, but why Katurian wrote this story. I believe that this story is Katurian's allegorized personal history, every bit as much as The Little Green Pig is Michal's. As a gifted young writer, he was loved and encouraged, just as the little Jesus. After his discovery that his parents are monsters (i.e. the old, kind parents were killed and replaced by the evil foster parents), they test his resolve to be an author by confronting him with the ultimate horror and torture. The sounds of the girl's scratching are Katurian's stories, written in the darkness, heard only by a passing stranger.

At one point in the story, the little girl's foster parents goad her: “You still want to be Jesus?!” The little girl replies: “I don't want to be Jesus, I fucking am Jesus.” The Little Jesus was distinguished in this production by the interpretation of the line: “I fucking AM Jesus!” In In New York, in keeping with the picture of humanity as children, this line was uttered innocently, and our laughter stemmed from the absurdity of such a thing coming from the mouth of a child. In Chicago, the laughter stems from the little girl's grown-up wrath. She IS Jesus, damn it, and she is furious that you would question it!

The Mosaic narrative structure of the idyllic beginning corrupted is in place here. That Katurian, egoistically, sees himself as a Christ figure when he has only been the witness to his brother's suffering (of course suffering in a different way, subsequently) is rather ludicrous, but here McDonagh is having fun with the writer's sense of self-importance. It is also ironic that later in the play Katurian specifically disavows biographical fiction. His stories, while allegorical, are almost exclusively autobiographical. Perhaps McDonagh is portraying the author's unawareness of the nature of his own creation. Perhaps Katurian is having a joke on us all—disclaiming all autobiographical storytelling, but secretly loving it.

It is appropriate that Michal's coup de grace of resentment/destruction/promotion of the stories lies in the performance of The Little Jesus. It is also interesting that Michal's story should be The Little Green Pig, while Katurian gets to be The Little Jesus. If anyone has a claim to sinless suffering, it is Michal, not Katurian. We can imagine him reading this story and seething—yet feeling a sense of dignity that his suffering has resulted in some meaningful representation. Katurian reacts severely to the revelation that his brother has acted out The Little Jesus. We can imagine (from this production) that this is just what Michal intended.

Following the portrayal of The Little Jesus, we are taken back to the office. Katurian has offered to confess to an active role in his parents' murders, the murder of his brother, and the murder of all the children, in exchange for the preservation of his stories. Ariel, recounting the story of The Little Jesus, shreiks primally: “Why does there have to be people like you!” Morton casts the two detectives as “everyman” types as opposed to clever “detective-genius” types (typically in the crime genre, as dueling good and evil, cop and criminal reveal each other most interestingly as geniuses). On Broadway Jeff Goldblum and Zelko Ivancek played the duo, and while both are physically powerful, they can be rather brainy and nebbishy in their affect. Not so at Steppenwolf. Rather, Peyankov and Letts are men whose hearts drive their desires, even as their minds facilitate those desires. They are, deep down, boyish in their energy. Ariel hates Katurian, because he supposes that Katurian is a child abuser. But even more deeply, he hates Katurian for writing about it and thus promoting others to it. But something happens that makes Ariel face with the realization that he is himself an admixture of Katurian and Michal.

Ariel exits to “get some sweets,” (a wonderfully childish impulse). He reenters, bent on showing Katurian no sympathy—preparing to torture him. As Ariel prepares to perform his own idea of justice, Katurian astutely notices Ariel's response to Katurian's having murdered his parents to relieve his suffering. We learn that Ariel was abused by his father and murdered his father in response. As an admixture of the two brothers he is a fully realized human being, while remaining a symbol character in the dualistic structure of the play. He sympathizes with Katurian. He hates Katurian. He finds himself largely in the position that Michal finds himself: he blames Katurian for his suffering and wants to destroy him; yet, the stories represent Katurian's attempt to give meaning to his suffering.

In New York, Ivancek's intellectual portrayal of Ariel rendered his passion at this point (the point of his inner conflict) somewhat dishonest. In Morton's production I implicitly understood the nature of Ariel's sympathy and hate for Katurian.

After Tupolski humorously confirms Ariel's secret, Ariel stalks off painfully. He reenters. Tupolski sips tea elegantly, acting like a detective-genius. Ariel retorts, resentfully, to Tupolski, that the Commissioner likes him better, and that he should be made the number one on the case and run it. Tupolski retorts by deducing, in humorously short order, that Katurian cannot confirm that the little girl used in the reenactment of The Little Jesus was dead or alive at the time of her live burial. Tupolski then informs the squad cars rushing to the scene where Katurian described the little girl's burial (Michal told Katurian and Katurian, in his fictitious confession, told the detectives) to move more quickly.

Ariel storms off again. Tupolski, preparing to execute Katurian, discourses with him at a leisurely pace about a story he himself wrote—the title of which contains far to many words and punctuation marks to be recalled accurately here. It is the story of a deaf little Chinese boy walking alone a long set of railroad tracks along a long plain. Tupolski addresses the audience as he informs us that a train is coming and that the little boy will not hear it—and thus will be killed. An old Chinese man (Letts, as Tupolski, employs some hilariously insensitive and savage racial humor here) sees, from afar, the boy strolling innocently on the tracks and correctly concludes that the boy will be killed. We can assume that this is why the story is set in China, Tupolski, like Katurian, has license to assign himself whatever role that he in his vain self-image likes. For Tupolski, the archetype of wisdom and intellectual fortitude is the Old Chinese Man.

The old man calculates the speed of the train and the point at which the deaf boy would be struck (Katurian correctly points out the hole in the story: how can the old man know that the boy is deaf? Tupolski brushes this detail aside—the symbolism is most important to our detective-author). The old man then, nonchalantly, folds the paper with which he made the calculation into a paper airplane, in just the right spot to distract the boy and pull him away from the tracks.

Tupolski, at the beginning of story time with Katurian, gives him license to speak. When Katurian criticizes Tupolski's title, he revokes the freedom of speech (illuminating some of the resentment Katurian felt for his brother/critic, and delightfully unravelling his assumed air of rational detective-genius). Katurian flatters Tupolski that he loves the story. And, as an allegory for the protector-detective, the character of the nonchalant Old Chinese Man is very expressive of Tupolski's own character, and illuminative of how McDonagh conceives of the act of storytelling. Each character in this play has stories that give his life expression and meaning, except Ariel. But Ariel's stories take a different form, as we will see.

Following story time, Tupolski describes the process by which Katurian will be executed. Ariel enters—they found the little girl, only not dead. She is painted green, like the pig. In this production Michal's final creative/destructive act was darkly humorous. He killed as little as possible in order to make his point. He lied about it, knowing that his lie would be exposed, and that this exposure would reveal his cunning and possible mental equality to his brother. Ariel exposes Katurian's plot to deceive the detectives. We see Tupolski's intellectual self-image deflate, and we see Ariel (who we previously think of as childish muscle) assume an intellectual role. Peyankov here does a fantastic golf swing after putting it together in front of Tupolski's wondering eyes.

Tupolski starts a fire in the tall trash can in the office (in New York it was a tiny paper basket; here a full aluminum alley can). The deal was that Katurian would be honest in his confession, and that his honest confession would earn him the preservation of the stories. Tupolski's vanity as a wise detective has been wounded. His pride as an author has been wounded by Katurian's criticism. He wants to hurt Katurian in the only way he knows how, and “as an honorable man” (as he constantly refers to himself, and as Katurian constantly refers to him) he is within his rights, within the context of the bargain, to burn the stories.

Ariel pleads on Katurian's behalf to save the stories. Tupolski then initiates the execution by placing a black hood on Katurian (Abu-Graib-esque). Stanislavski, in My Life in Art recalls, as a demonstration of tempo/rhythm (internal/external action), a portrayal of Mary Stuart going to a beheading. Her internal rhythm is frenetic. But, to maintain royal bearing, her external rhythm is easy. I was reminded of this when I saw True-Frost's portrayal of Katurian's final moments—as he says “I was a good writer.” Tupolski, after explaining that Katurian would be shot following a countdown from ten, shoots him on four. Tupolski excuses himself to go “warn the parents”, but we can imagine that this is to save face. Ariel has pleaded on behalf of Katurian's stories and Tupolski is leaving them in Ariel's hands.

Before the play ends, two things happen. First, in the seconds prior to his execution, Katurian imagines a story for his brother. It is one in which Katurian, as the Pillowman, tells his brother, as a child, of the future that is about to transpire, in hopes that his brother will destroy himself as a child. His brother, citing the stories that will survive as the result of their mutual suffering, refuses to un-wish his life.

That Michal's place in Katurian's story is as a living, suffering instrument of story production highlights the justice in Michal's sense of grievance. Every story except The Little Green Pig is a direct meditation of Katurian's experience as the witness to suffering, as opposed to a consideration of Michal's experience. While Michal's torture is germane to the stories, he is not, except, abstractly, in The Little Green Pig, the subject of the stories. Herein lies Katurian's, and the artist's, failure: preoccupation with the self as a witness to the action of humanity, rather than with humanity itself.

The other thing that happens is that Ariel proves himself to be the real good cop: he saves the stories, and they become his stories. Where he was the only character without any meaningful narrative interpretation of his life as detective/chronicler/sufferer/actor, he will find, in Katurian's stories, his own story. And in the preservation of the stories he will find some measure of hope. Bizarrely, in the world of The Pillowman, this constitutes a happy ending.

Steppenwolf wisely holds post-show discussions following every production of The Pillowman—helping an audience process, together, the disturbing material they have just shared. One criticism of the show was that the evil in the world of the play was unexplained, and that this was somehow a cop-out. I disagreed. The parents who initiate the suffering in the play never betray their motives, and as such, as gods, they give us no theodicy. But mankind and mankind's artists are portrayed as responsible for the creation of their own God in this production. McDonagh charges mankind with responsibility for deciding how to read and understand art, and he charges artists with responsibility for creating relevant, truthful art. He also indirectly accuses the authors of the bible of self-centeredness as narrators. But in The Pillowman, mankind constructs his own sense of the meaning of his suffering and perhaps a way to save himself.

In Martha Lavey's (the Steppenwolf artistic director) introductory notes, she addresses the issue of dualism in the play: “two rooms, two brothers, two detectives”. What is so fascinating about The Pillowman (and this production specifically) is how deeply opposite those dualisms run within the context of brotherhood (not just between Katurian and Michal, but between Tupolski and Ariel, as brothers in police). It is also fascinating how the intimacy between the doubles illuminates them and their shared dialectics of obsession. Katurian experiences the exact opposite of Michal—an idyllic childhood interrupted by the discovery of suffering, and thus, ensuing suffering. Michal experiences suffering until he is discovered and relieved of it. Katurian and Michal, by being portrayed both as adults (and rather similar looking, in shape and face, at that), are contemporaries. The same is true for Tupolski and Ariel, who, as mentioned previously, are played in this production as ruddy, rugged, and strong. Tupolski is the one obsessed with reason and structure, and Ariel is the one obsessed with acting out justice (i.e. torture). And yet, each of these brother/others comes to embody the core identity of his other. Katurian passionately kills. Michal intellectually chooses. Tupolski kills. Ariel solves the case. Ariel saves the stories.

The two sets of men are themselves doubles, as Katurian (a good cop like Tupolski) is obsessed with giving the world's experiences order through story, and Michal (a bad cop like Ariel) is obsessed with acting impulsively. And yet, Michal's intellectually chosen (if evil) action, the murder of the children, is ultimately what gives, us, through the action of the play, a sense of the true meaning of his experience. Ariel's ability to reason leads to the preservation of the stories. Even their names, Katurian and Tupolski (cold sounding last names) and Ariel and Michal (gentle sounding first names) suggest this dualism of duals. The brothers are criminals and the detectives are cops. But, as Nietzsche does in The Birth of Tragedy (with the orderly Apollo and the drunken Dionysis), The Pillowman, beautifully, outlines the boundaries of McDonagh's view of the world, through the living relief of its opposites—cop and criminal, artist and humanity, and others. Each character, remarkably, is endowed with the essential qualities of every other character in the piece, even within the context of a sybolic dualistic structure. This miracle of characterization contains within it McDonagh's vision of man's holistic nature.. Man is all at once a sufferer, artist, critic, and as a spiritual being, capable of acting comprehensively on his own behalf.

Humanity makes a critical choice in this production that is the key to McDonagh's view of good and evil: people (especially Michal) justify evil actions by choosing to believe, critically, that narrative causes violence and that they are helpless to stop it. They use this critical resentment to deny the idea of free will. How can we blame them? The stories themselves seem to concede the point. The little girl knows or is willfully ignorant of the fact that her apple men will kill her father. The Pillowman knows that his stories will destroy his subjects. Michal's parents were prompted by a bizarre literary fascination to torture Michal, and Katurian's stories prompt Michal to violence. Ariel may believe that his father's abuse (and all abuse) is rooted in representations of that abuse in media, and Ariel's narratized self-representation of that abuse (along with, we can imagine, media representations of vigilanteism) inspires the violence that he undertakes. Humanity is both a sufferer and a critic in this production, and humanity's critical beliefs inform its performance of evil.

But this critical choice is just that, critical, and therefore normative. The hope in this production lies in the possibility that the artist can fixate more clearly on his subjects, and that his subjects can learn a critical lesson, namely, that stories of abuse don't necessarily lead to real abuse. And that hope is underscored in Michal's (possibly rosy) ending as imagined by Katurian, and Ariel's choice to preserve Katurian's stories. Michal, mankind as sufferer and reader, can choose not to destroy himself, and have faith in the redemptive power of art, even in the midst of the artist's self-preoccupation. Ariel can overcome his belief that art causes violence, can feel art's redemptive power, and can act on this belief by preserving the stories. He and Katurian's imagined Michal affirm the possibility that representations of evil may have a function beyond an incitement to more evil—indeed that art itself may, at some point, offer the redemption that the Pillowman believes will never come.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan's Grand Inquisitor indicts Christ for having denied Satan's three temptations in the desert, thus denying man both certainty in faith and food as incentive for that faith. The basis for this indictment is that mankind is too weak to withstand the suffering inherent to such spiritual freedom (i.e., man's faith should not be bought). McDonagh demands a truthful artistic freedom over a false, socially balmy constriction. He wonders at the spiritual freedom inherent to artistic freedom, and hopes that man need not continue to suffer.

1-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky (London: Vintage, 1992), 245.
2-Jacob Neusner, An Introduction to Judaism (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991) 131-155.