A new year, a new post

Here's my profile of a piece going up in Brooklyn for the Rail.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/07/theater/a-play-at-poolside-caridad-svichs-12-ophelias

Where have I been?!

Apologies for the hiatus. I haven't posted anything for two months or so. That doesn't mean I haven't been writing--I've been working on the voluminous survey of The Sparrow that is just below this post. However, over the past few months my Ben Franklin gig ended, I transitioned to a new job as an office-monkey, and I've been out of town frequently for grad school interviews and one matzahlicious Jewish holiday.

There are two bits of good news: the first is that the long, agonizing process of writing the Sparrow piece is over: it is a very rich, deep show, and the writing process on it was long and difficult. I know it's long, so I've divided it into two parts. The first part attempts to place the House's work into a contemporary critical context. The second part strives to illustrate how they and their designers are telling stories in this instance.

The second bit of good news is that I've been accepted and will attend a dramaturgy MFA program at Columbia University in New York. So I'll be moving soon. While this means that this particular project will be ending soon, I hope to resurrect it in New York soon under a new domain name. I'll post it here.

I also hope that the type of project I've undertaken here can be continued in the future. I still believe that this type of discussion is necessary, and I believe that there is enough smart theater viewership in Chicago to pull together a staff of writers to do it. If and when I return to Chicago, I'll try to do it myself.

And, come to think of it, I have a third bit of good news: I've been hired to lead an adventure program for groups of kids to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. So following May there will be another long hiatus as I work on my tan, my camping and fishing skills, and my childish over-exuberance. Then, following my move to the Upper West Side, I'll resume posts in some respect.

To everyone who has visited--thanks for reading and supporting the project. It has been the beginning of a real adventure for me, and I hope you can be a part of the next step.
--Dave

Collaboraction's week of Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays

"To an absurd mind, reason is useless, and yet there is only reason."
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears."
America, the Beautiful

"All of my plays are about love and distance."
Suzan-Lori Parks


Today, February 2, 2007, Barack Obama seems like a man of destiny. Everyone is talking about him, and more importantly, everyone believes that he is going to win and do right. Forget Biden's comparison of his articulateness compared to other African-American presidential candidates. Barack Obama is erudite by the standards of any American politician in the 20th or 21st century, period. By entering the presidential race, he is initiating a serious racial discussion in our country that has not been undertaken on a widespread level since the 1970s.

Now, of course, I live in Chicago, so my sense of this "destiny" is probably a bit overstated. Obama is a Chicago politician, and I went to the University of Chicago, while he and his wife were living and working down there. I met her a few times and she is a really interesting, charming woman. But aside from the pro-Obama-destiny bias stemming from my time in Hyde Park, and aside from the exuberance that Chicagoans feel at a hometown politician entering such a stage, there are other rational reasons to feel skeptical about this sense of destiny. The right-wing has not yet unloaded on him yet--indeed, no one, save for a totally ineffectual Keyes campaign (and a by-the-book Bobby Rush for congress campaign before that, which I also witnessed on the south side). And, of course, he's only been in the Senate for two years. And there are several other facts, that without turning this article into a New Republic submission, could still very seriously hinder his candidacy.

But we feel it, this sense of destiny, and I have come to believe that it is because of, and not in spite of, the very obstacles that we see between Obama and the presidency that we believe in him. Americans love their ideals, and the mood in the country is deeply pessimistic. Barack Obama's candidacy represents the coming-of-age of the ideals of 60s liberalism. This is America, the multi-cultural America, in which anyone, of any background, given a decent opportunity can do anything. This is the America that we learned about in elementary school in the 80s as the inheritance from Martin Luther King's martyrdom.

This sense of idealism in darkness fueled the enthusiasm behind Carter and Reagan, two deeply idealistic candidates entering the stage at profoundly difficult national moments. We need to feel good about America right now, and we need to make that which we believe to be the best and most lovable thing about America come true.

Barack Obama, for many on both the left and right, is an abstraction onto which they can project their fantasies about this American ideal coming true, and the more difficult it appears for Obama, the more they love his candidacy, because it is a miraculous awakening of a wellspring of patriotic feeling. It feels, for those who believe in the ideals to which Obama's candidacy appeals, like a miraculous destiny for a man of his skin color to be president right now. And Obama senses this--his campaign is the definitely shaping the contest to come as one between idealistic optimism that is going somewhere, and pessimistic pragmatism, that has gone nowhere.

Suzan-Lori Parks says that all her plays "are about love and distance." This is certainly true on the domestic level, especially in The America Play. But this love/distance obsession translates most profoundly, in my view, on the political level--in the expression of our political ideals. This is one reason why I believe the the recent 365 Days/365 Plays project in Chicago has been so resonant. Parks feels, in the air, the most recent incarnation of the American ideal shattered, and shows us the responses.

The 365/365 project is the result of a year in which Parks wrote one play a day. Jason Loewith at Next Theatre, whom I met when I was in Hyde Park, when he was casting at Court Theatre, is leading the project to produce this work, week-by-week, in Chicago's theaters. Actually, one wanting to survey the methods of Chicago theater could simply attend each of these performances to get a sense for how each ensemble presents a single playwright's vision.

Parks' vision is of a world in which we are conscious of the futility of action in the service of our ideals. In Chekhov, in Uncle Vanya, the inability to accept this reality amounts to despair for his characters. Parks' characters know that the ideals for which they strive can never be attained, that they enable exploitation and participation in political horrors, and yet, they cannot resist these ideals.

This is the world of Parks' best-known allegory, from both The America Play and TopDog/UnderDog, which both concern a similar principal character, a black man who plays the role of Abraham Lincoln in a carnival attraction in which patrons can act out assassinating him for kicks. In The America Play, we are invited into his nuclear family--which he abandons to go west and make his fortune (ie realize his ideal).

In TopDog/UnderDog, the Black Lincoln character is shown in a different situation--living with his brother, a ne'er do well, ironically named Booth by their father. Lincoln (that is his given name in the play this time) is portrayed as a reformed 3-card-monty shark. He has mastered the magical ideal that has the power to seduce, in spite of its clear fraudulence. His brother is a small-time shoplifter. Booth envies his brothers talent and demands instruction and initiation into the art.

Lincoln is presented to us as a shaman who has traversed the boundaries of his black community, and returned as master of the magic through which the community is ruled. As a card shark, he is a celebrity, a genius, and a hero. But he is not content with this status in the community, as his journey prior to the action of the play has conferred a certain wisdom. Lincoln has exceeded the need for adulation stemming from his mastery of the art. Moreover, he is aware of the dangers of this type of magic--he believes it would get him shot. He refuses to share the wisdom with his brother. He doubts his brother's ability to assimilate that wisdom and he fears for his brother's life should he attain the ability to master the magic without the life-expanding consciousness through which he (Lincoln) has managed to attain desirelessness at the top of the play.

Inscribed in these stories and characters is a radical reading of black and American identity, as well as a living metaphorical depiction of the relationship between Americans and their ideals. Three-card-monty is the metaphor for our impossible, and yet impossibly seductive ideals. We are aware of its fraudulence. But we cannot resist. How do we win our bread, if we are not in the game? By assuming a role and willingly submitting to our own humiliation. In Lincoln's case, he assumes the role of the white foreign patriarch undergoing martyrdom in the service of his ideal. But this is, for Parks, the essence of American life. We assume the role of another's ideal--and then we actively submit to it. But all the while, we are dreaming of mastering the impossible game.

Collaboraction's portion of 365/365 is a depiction of the responses to characters across a broad spectrum of backgrounds to a consciousness of this world. And through a highly audience-interactive style, they depict our own responses to this perverse awareness, too. For the plays produced by Collaboraction in their portion of 365/365 transpire in a world similar to that of Parks' other works.

I was expecting a more or less standard theatrical experience, a seat, a program, house music, and then the show. That is not how it worked. The audience climbed three flights of stairs, at the landings of which we were presented with signs with Parks' quotations--from which the quote at the top was taken. After milling about in the hall, checking in, getting tickets, briefly greeting those we knew, we entered a huge loft space, in which a monolithic DJ stand was built--above which hovered a living space/office from which tech was being run, and in which two giant loosely interlocking platforms ran across the floor. The feel was of an elaborate cocktail party at a club. There were photographic projections of post-industrial and other scenes, and a light show, consisting of light blue and green. There was also a glowing blacklight in the room, reflecting off of large cutouts posted on one of the huge walls of the space.

There was a free bar, and a table at which we could buy Collaboraction stuff. I saw several friends from the show milling about in costume, in character. I saw and chatted with several other friends, and it suddenly occurred to me that this experience of artists meeting and greeting was park of the experience. My isolation, taking notes in the corner, felt foreign. So I mingled.

Thus, the first portion of Collaboraction's presentation gave a representational presentation to the act of socializing. The plays would emerge from the social flux. But we, in our conversations, are shoulder-surfing, checking out to see who's doing what, considering ourselves in the same light. We objectify our peers, measuring ourselves against them in this foreign environment, and we feel ourselves being measured, too.

The stage manager toured the room, quietly giving places calls. The lights calm, and we hear the THX sound-intro. We hear melodramatic strings. The DJ starts talking and rapping over pounding beats. We start moving our bodies, unconsciously to the rhythms. This compounds the club/party atmosphere. Suddenly, we see Sienna Harris running, fast, up the right platform, then ducking and hiding from an imposing bolt of thunder. She is playing a small girl, wearing a depression era girl's dress. She calls out that there's "nothing here." A muscular man, Beethoven Oden, in dreadlocks, enters and tends to her. He is in a child's depression-era garb as well. Interestingly, Margot Bordenton, the director of the piece, chose not to cast actors with skinny, child-like bodies in this piece that features two anachronistically costumed children.

This is a choice. The underlying suggestion, from the top, is that this child's play is an allegorical restatement of the action in adult lives. In silence, watching the two actors, Oden and Harris looking for something, we feel an excruciating tension. From the precipice of the edge of the platform, Harris' character drops a belt and watches it fall. In a moment of physical play that was beautiful, Oden restrains her as she appears to want to jump from the edge of the precipice. As he restrains her, the tension that we felt underlying the action at the top of the scene explodes, as she recounts the horrors of nuclear devastation, and the sense of her own hypothetical and conditional culpability in the the US' dropping of the bomb, had she or other African-Americans been in power at the time.

Oden's character urges the girl to "come inside" with an contrasting, soothing authority and presence. The two characters hear a dog's bark in the distance, and the immediate action of the piece is clear: these two, the boy and girl, have been looking for their dog. We see them share a focus, out toward the dog. They celebrate the dog's return together.

As children, these characters bespeak innocence. But as black children in the garb of the Jim Crow era, they take on a special quality of innocence. This piece suggests an era when blacks in the south lacked virtually any influence on the political process. Harris' character, in this millieu, conjures the images of the bad choices that history leads us to, politically, and the attendant sense of culpability, even amidst the most innocent.

Further, as a mutual friend of Harris' and mine pointed out following the production (a by product of Collaboraction's choice of staging was to encourage this sort of reflection), there is the question of image. The only time the two characters share a point of focus is when the dog is discovered offstage. The larger question of culpability in the horror of Hiroshima is subsumed by the mundane, but shared and simple task of finding the dog, just as the question of the fraudulent appeal of the three-card monty game is subsumed by the everyday tasks of most characters in TopDog. Just as the game is a point of obsession, so is the political world and conditions that underpin the decision to drop the bomb. Just as the game feels inescapably appealing, so one's participation in large political decisions feels inescapable.

This ineluctable reduction of the individual's will to an ideal is then presented from an alternate perspective. We are presented another DJ'ed interlude, in which Anacron Allen refers to Chicago as a "town outside Gary" and plays sax to an infectious beat. The interludes set a baseline rhythm for normalcy for the evening, and the performers either consciously or unconsciously feed off of or play against this rhythm. The cool blue light sets the tone as we enter "The Palace at 4 AM", according to the play's title.

We shift our attention from utterly powerless characters, to the putatively powerful. There is a trill of stately medieval music. We see a woman in royal looking robes (Kay Schmidt), then a man (Len Bajenski), in similar robes, enter, entreating her to "come back to bed" at a similar rhythm to that set by DJ Anacron at the top of the scene. The woman, a mother and a queen, we learn, laments her son's estrangement at a contrastingly slow pace. The son, she says threw his crown in the dirt. We feel her persuade her husband to share the lament. The sun rises, brilliantly. We hear the sound of light string music. They contemplate who will rule. According to the scuttlebutt, it will be the servants. The king vows to protect her at the end.

The theme of a ruling class being supplanted by their servants resonates with the Cherry Orchard, and here, as in the Cherry Orchard, nature's action is a metaphor for the onstage action. The event of the sun's rising adds a nice metaphysical touch. Nature is moving from now to the future, and the social order is changing in just such a way. The mystery by which our community and world is ruled does not, in Parks' world, flow from human beings individually, but something higher, either people collectively or something even more mysterious than that. In Parks' world it is the awareness of one's powerlessness over that mystery that provokes a sense of despair. We are aware of how deeply we are subject to powers greater than our own, and yet we are forced to look for the dog, and we are powerless over our desire to hand the kingdom over to our son. There is this deeply felt distance between us and what we love and want.

Following another interlude from Anacron, we then move back to the other platform, to join a young man (Brad Smith) and woman (Sarah Gitenstein). They climb, with some effort, the platform, suggesting a Sisyphean struggle. The man asks the woman where she's taking him, again at what felt to be the baseline rhythm of the piece, stemming from Anacron's interlude. "Are you taking me to my parents? To the cemetery?", he asks. (I'm paraphrasing here). And at the suggestion of parents, I linked this young man to the preceding piece. The long backpacking trip or encounter with nature feels like a rite of passage, and I inferred from the preceding scene that that's is precisely what the son of the Royal couple was longing for. We have shifted from the cool light of the castle to the warm bucolic tones of nature. The two of them are in crunchy, earthy-looking costumes.

His subsequent question, and her reply are illustrative: "I'm not dead yet!" he asks--and she says "You will be!" The sense here of impending doom transitions from the first scene. The young man is seeking to escape his status as a putative member of the ruling class, and senses his powerlessness to do so. The humor in despair here is glorious: "I can dig the hole!" he replies.

He offers to give her a ride on his back. When he falls, and she grows scared, we sense the underlying fear and despair in the piece, and the pace slackens. After removing his backpack, he re-offers to give her a ride on his back, claiming that he's "still a man." "Sure you are," she replies, as the scene closes.

Following another infectiously scored interlude from Anacron, the same platform is the venue for the following piece, "Space Invaders," a meditation on fundamentalism and nihilistic secularism as a response to Parks' Sisyphean atmosphere of impossibly distant and impossibly seductive ideals. A man pointing "finger guns" with both hands follows sounds of wildlife and shoots. The lights remain in warm tones. Scooter, played by Brad Akin, wearing a mustache and a bathrobe enters, demanding skeptically "What are you doing?!" When Shooter (the other character, played by Max Lesser) responds that he's engaged in target practice, Akin responds, hilariously, in a wonderfully contrary tone and rhythm that he "doesn't see shit." Shooter warns that there are aliens and that Scooter, a non-believer is in danger. Scooter walks off, replying: "I'm gonna watch TV and jerk off." Shooter responds that Scooter can "suit yourself."

Thus Parks links the atmosphere of despair underlying the prior few pieces with the surge in eschatological expectations following from the aftermath of September 11. The fundamentalist response is to focus on the movement of supernatural ideals, and in seeing Shooter preparing for the aliens, we see a represented picture of the war-like mentality of those readers of Revelations who are preparing for the Last Days. We despair of our powerlessness, and we find comfort, on the one hand, from the eschatological expectations and preparations found in fundamentalism.

On the other hand is Scooter, who looks to television and cheap masturbatory titillation as a balm against the atmosphere of despair and insecurity, and as a response to the seeming senselessness of the Shooter. Here, form and content are married: Scooter is radically secular in response to Shooter's radical fundamentalism. But the form, the contrapuntal tone, is the vessel by which we see this response, and the piece succeeds brilliantly because of it.

Then, to complement the rural setting of the previous two pieces, we hear banjo music mixed with hip-hop. Our focus shifts back to the opposite platform. We see rich, green light, and a young man, David Dastmalchian, alone. He is meditating, out loud, on his ability to "barn burn." This is literal. He can "make himself known" by burning his uncle's barn. The title of the piece is "Hamlet/The Hamlet," which is perhaps a suggestion of the melancholy prince in a rural village. That is how the piece is presented by Collaboraction. The young man resents his status as poor, his dead father who is more useful dead than alive, he claims. He begs God for help, and as he does, a woman invites him in to eat. Here is an inversion of the previous form--a young man's torments interrupted by his mother (Gertrude, we presume), where previously in "There's Nothing Here" and "The Palace at 4am," the man consoles and invites inside the tormented woman.

The mother, Morgan McCabe, stands arm in arm with her son, in what we presume is a purposely romantically suggestive pose. She asks if he'll come into eat or simply stare at the barn. She demands at a challenging tone, "They say you're a barn-burner. Are they liars?" He returns inside, and the mother is alone on the porch. "God help us, every one," she prays fervently.

This linkage of the fundamentalist posture with the Hamlet "futility of action" conundrum is key, as they both seem understandable responses to the atmosphere created by the piece. We then hear a mix of 40s music with hip-hop beats, and see a sharply dressed woman strewing the opposite platform with belongings, and Eagan Reich (who recently appeared as Judas Iscariot in Steep's production of the Stephen Adly Guirgis' Last Days of Judas Iscariot) sitting nonchalantly. We see books, shoes and other belongings scatter. The formal action of the scene then starts, and we see the man playing a video game to antiquated "Atari" sounds. The woman is dressing and packing her purse. There is a yellow light on the stage. He loses his game, and at an even tone asks her what she's doing. She replies that that she has a meeting later that day with Brad Pitt (Hence the name of the piece, "Meeting Brad Pitt"). The man is clearly drunk from the bottle of Jim Beam on stage. He tries to make conversation about her life--and is so divorced from her reality that he cannot. The piece closes with his advice to her: "don't pay that guy top dollar!", which had the audience in hysterics.

There is a great link between Hamlet's struggles for meaningful action and Reich's character's prolonged, sodden, adolescence. He and the woman, played by Kristala Pouncy, remain a relationship which, we might infer, has seen her grow into the role of a professional and him remain an adolescent. We might also infer that they have met and fallen in love just as they are. But however we read their relationship, it is clear that Parks is offering us a vision of two sides of a coin in this relationship. His response to the futility of action is to retreat. Hers is to race forward in action. But they are essentially opposites that revolve around the same center. That such a match is absurd and hilarious highlights the absurdity of extremes around which characters in Parks' world settle their lives.

The final response of the evening is suicide, in "Trust Life," which features Merci Oni, doing really stunning work. The scene opens to the cast, in hospital gowns, moving through the space as we hear piano music slow. The lights go out. We see Merci in the center of the space beneath an intense special light. She looks frightened. We hear a clap of thunder. The rest of the hospital people emerge. We hear them whispering something out of sync, indistinguishable at first, that builds to an intense hiss at a high rhythm. "Trust life," they are saying. Merci balances on one foot. We hear another clap of thunder. She gasps. "Trust life," the cast says together. In a beautifully executed move, Merci flips her hand up and pantomimes slitting her throat.

Camus calls suicide the ultimate philosophical question, and as such, it is fitting that Parks' deeply philosophically-themed work ends here. Parks presents us a world in which we rely, rather than on the absurd mind's reason, on ideals to which we are inextricably linked by virtue of the circumstances of our birth. The responses to the impossibility of these ideals compose the theme of much of her work, and a prism through which Collaboraction helps us understand our political and social reality.

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.

Dear Grad School,

Chicago needs a magazine that consolidates serious dramaturgical analysis into one place. It needs such a publication to support the ongoing cultural discussion taking place in its theaters. It is my goal to publish this magazine, and further, to participate in the ongoing discussion realized in it, as both a creative artist and as an artist-critic.

Why does Chicago need such a publication? What do I hope to contribute to Chicago's cultural discussion as a creative artist? And why do I need training from your program?

First, let's consider the question of Chicago's need for a dramaturgical magazine, which I consider to be the most important. Let's consider the living personality of Chicago Theater. It may be absurd to assign human qualities to something as abstract as a city or a scene, but in conversation we do this constantly (I endow Chicago with "need" in my first paragraph). When we use this form of synecdoche, we express, usually unscientifically, our feelings toward abstractions such as cities and organizations. Often these unscientific feelings are entirely accurate.

Chicago is, approximately, an actor. This actor is driven by an irrepressible, super-conscious, organic impulse to create. This actor-leviathan creates a vast amount of cultural material in its theaters every year. It is obsessively driven to perform. It neither fully understands why it is performing nor can it fully see or hear itself. To the extent that it learns and grows, it does so incompletely or not at all. Yet this drive to create is so basic that it stubbornly, obsessively, persists.

What stories does it tell or, (to avoid narrative-centrism) what types of performances does it make? How does it make these performances—how does it, for example, conceive of events on stage? How does it create atmosphere? How does it use rhythm and movement to accomplish its aims?

Like a great organism without well-defined brain functions, it lacks a central consciousness. Partly, this is due to the “neighborhood” culture of the city. But I reject the notion that, because Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, it is somehow, with respect to theater (or in general), not a discrete cultural unit. Its artists and other citizens move across every part of the city in every aspect of their daily pursuits, from day-job, to leisure, to creative endeavors. Even when theater artists work exclusively in standing ensembles, they experience the city comprehensively. If artists rarely left their neighborhood (as is sometimes true of artists in Hyde Park), then I would accept that the diffusion of Chicago's theatrical-aesthetic consciousness is the result of the nature of its neighborhoods.

But Chicago is indeed an integrated, discrete cultural unit, and the only reason it, as a theater artist, lacks a central consciousness is because no one person or organization has made it their goal to foster one. This must be remedied by the establishment of a forum for the analysis of cultural material being incessantly produced by Chicago Theater.

I speak of Chicago as an actor, and this is based on my feel for the scene. While directors and designers of every type prosper artistically in Chicago, it feels, to me like a scene dominated by young actors (since I am a recovering Chicago actor, this likely is not coincidental). Chicago is, in fact, a very attractive destination for young, energetic actors, and this is due to a unique confluence of conditions that only meet in Chicago, and the consequent “mode of production” of theater in Chicago (to borrow a Marxist economic term).

For example, for a major city, rent is uncommonly inexpensive, even near functional public transit. The midwest is nearly unipolar with respect to theater, and the artistic energy of a vast portion of the country collects here for reasons of relative proximity to home. Chicago's economy has boomed in the past 20 years, relative to other industrial midwestern cities. Thus, actors find day-jobs that afford them a relatively balanced lifestyle compared to most U.S. actors starting their careers. Training is accessible, varied and inexpensive. Representation is attainable, and actors who make an effort can, in a short time, work in commercials, voice-overs and industrials. Most importantly, however, actors in Chicago can work constantly, practice and develop as artists.

The conditions that make the (to borrow another economic term) barriers to entry low for young actors also make Chicago an excellent place to start a small theater company. There is an enormous body of young, diverse talent, through which one can cast a variety of shows for little to no pay. Rents for performance and rehearsal spaces are inexpensive, even near good public transit. Further, Chicago has an attentive, consumer-oriented press that reviews every sort of company's work. Chicago has a body of ethnic, neighborhood, and special-interest organizations who support non-profit art groups both as donors and ticket-buyers. The spirit of the city is generally supportive of the arts, as well.

As a result, theater in Chicago is produced by over 200 companies, mostly small-scale, itinerant operators. It is relatively easy to put up basic, technically simple productions in Chicago. The spirit is collaborative, non-profit, low budget, actor-centric, and productive. At any given time there are 50-100 (and sometimes more) productions running.

The non-profit theater scene is divided between two general types of companies. First, there are many companies mostly made up of young actors who, realistically speaking, use their companies as career vehicles, or as an outlet for their basic desire to create something. They believe, implicitly, and not altogether incorrectly, in my view, that the idea of theater is the exhibition and development of acting, in ensemble. This dramaturgical vision is not particularly profound, nor is it commonly consciously considered. Many ensembles consider staging works on the basis of whether a prospective work evokes a vaguely positive sentiment in a majority of its membership. While this collaborative/democratic operation is a step up from strictly commercial motives, it results in work that is, frankly, basic. It is entertaining enough to watch. It is "good enough" and is meant to be. But it is not really ambitious, and it is not really interesting cultural material.

Many companies do, however, seriously engage dramaturgical questions. That is to say: they are innovative in confronting questions of what they do and how they do it, and oftentimes they are very technically innovative on a small budget. They are meditative about questions of what stories should be told or what performances should be made, and they are typically highly cognizant of the dialogue between art and culture. Some of these companies conceive of the Chicago theater community as a discussion amongst different niches—we have historical theater, various ethnic theaters, theater focused on classics, and others. Still others conceive of their role in this discussion more generally and flexibly: they choose seasons that speak to the cultural dialogue that they find important that year.

The scene is so vast and most artists are so hard at work on their own careers that they cannot comprehensively learn from their peers' work throughout the city, industry nights notwithstanding. It is impossible to know what is happening artistically throughout the city, or to, in the words of the African proverb: "see the whole elephant." We are all touching our own small part of the scene, the elephant. There is, therefore, little widespread discussion of trends or dramaturgical standards, even amongst those whose work aspires to participate in such a discussion.

We must find a way to analytically survey the work being done in Chicago theaters each year. To do this we must establish a critical vocabulary and tone that will defy the "consumer reports" nature of what passes for criticism, and strive to give the reader a comprehensive, objective, and yet analytical understanding of what ensembles or directors did and how they did it, throughout the city. This survey must support the dramaturgically serious theaters in their awareness of the cultural material being created by Chicago Theater, and it must support their effort to speak to each other and to the city at large. And this survey must be a first opportunity for theaters that don't profoundly engage such dramaturgical questions to listen to and hopefully take part in the discussion.

Primarily, theater practitioners must write the survey, because the spirit of the thing must be the enrichment of the artistic process—it must consist of artists helping one another to understand the cultural material and cultural discussion produced by the community. Others may profit by adding to or witnessing this discussion, but this discussion must find its center between working artists.

To the question of what I hope to contribute as an artist, the answer is much less developed. That is partly due to the fact that I want to learn from the directors of your program. I am largely driven by the same irrepressible, organic impulse of creation that I feel (probably not altogether coincidentally or unsolipsistically) driving Chicago's theater. And my quest to understand my own artistic nature does, somewhat, drive my quest to understand Chicago.

I do have some firm beliefs, however: I believe strongly that a director or producer must know why they are producing a work of art, and more importantly, why they are producing that work of art now. I believe that art must operate on many levels (while understanding the cultural artifice of the idea of such levels)—metaphysical, political, cultural, domestic, and personal. I am a firm devotee of narrative theater, but I love deconstructed narratives (so long as the narrative is in the first place well-known, as with, for example, Charles Mee's adaptations of classics). I believe in constantly striving to find new ways to create events and affect an audience. I believe in experimenting with new ways to create atmosphere. And I am very open to unconventional and physical rehearsal, ensemble building, storytelling and story-creating processes. I have a very open mind about these “firm” beliefs—precisely because I anticipate that the training and apprenticeship I will receive in grad school will change me personally and the nature of the artistic contribution I wish to make.

As an actor, I have worked in professional theater in Chicago for 7 years. I have trained with Jessica Thebus, Kurt Naebig, Gavin Witt, Curt Columbus, and the Moscow Art Theater at their summer program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have done workshops with both SITI Company and Joanne Akalitis. That work has expanded my vocabulary for describing analytically what happens in performance, from moment to moment. My collegiate training in close readings of fundamental texts has supplied me with a vocabulary with which to discuss close readings of performance in their larger context—as cultural products. I have worked to employ this vocabulary toward the goal of the widespread survey I aim for by starting and writing a blog, chicago-survey.blogspot.com. These efforts, however are not enough. I need training in support of my goals.

I need training in critical and narrative theory (beyond the study of the aesthetic and other texts I handled in college) to develop a tone and vocabulary of criticism that facilitates the necessary sort of discussion. Furthermore, as a working dramaturg, a sharply developed and articulate critical faculty will be necessary in advising directors in production or in the development of texts, productions and seasons. I need training in theater history and theory (beyond what I have taught myself through Marvin Carlson's survey), exposure to texts and analysis (beyond efforts at ongoing literacy), and I need apprenticeship with innovative and imaginative directors (beyond the work of an aspiring actor and dramaturg in Chicago). I need to develop skills as a translator (beyond my collegiate French and Italian, and possibly adding a language). I need to work overseas and in other American cities, and I need to eventually work to bring the work of international and American artists from other cities to Chicago.

These goals are dear to me, because Chicago is is dear to me, and because my creative spirit is the most important thing to me. I believe that through such training I can evolve personally. More importantly, I believe that by working to centralize and enhance Chicago's theatrical-aesthetic consciousness, I can help Chicago evolve culturally. That is an ambitious goal, but it is attainable, and worthy of my effort and your support.