Opening Thursday at LTV for a two-week run, Martin McDonagh's play "The Pillowman" brings together a team of theatrical professionals who have prior history both with each other and with Mr. McDonagh's material.
Steve Hamilton directs and Josh Gladstone co-produces (along with Kassar Productions); the pair worked together on many occasions at Bay Street Theater, of which Mr. Hamilton was a founder, and at Guild Hall, where Mr. Gladstone was the longtime artistic director of the John Drew Theater. They did a production of Mr. McDonagh's "The Cripple of Inishmaan" together at Guild Hall in 2013.
The team of talent includes Edward Kassar and Joe Pallister, friends who have worked together on many projects over the last decade. Mr. Kassar and Mr. Hamilton have also worked together before, and Mr. Kassar appeared alongside John Kroft in "Dirty Talk" last year at the Clubhouse. They worked with Sawyer Spielberg in a 2019 production of "Art" at Guild Hall. And Mr. Kroft, playing the lead role of Katurian, fell in love with "The Pillowman" so hard years ago that he even based a college research project on it.
"It's nice to work with people that you have and share a common nerd-dom and passion with," Mr. Gladstone, now LTV's artistic director, said in an interview. "Hamilton is that, Kroft is that, Kassar and Pallister are that. I love reconnecting with Kassar and Pallister, and then Sawyer Spielberg is great, too. I've worked with him and directed him, and I'm so happy to be working with him. It's just a good vibe -- a good vibe all around."
To have a team so comfortable with each other is an advantage when taking on such heavy material. "The Pillowman" deals with the topic of child abuse in a darkly funny way, pushing envelopes as Mr. McDonagh is known to do, but it still comes with a trigger warning on the poster: "Due to the graphic description of violence in 'The Pillowman,' children under the age of 16 will not be admitted."
"But that's McDonagh," Mr. Hamilton said. "In fact, the legend is that after his early successes on the stage, at the West End and on Broadway, he started getting criticism about the darkness of his plays and this was his response: something even darker, even funnier."
The story follows a character called Katurian, a writer living in a fictional totalitarian state, whose gruesome but made-up short stories make him a suspect in a series of strange murders. When it debuted in 2003, London's Daily Herald called the play "Brothers Grimm rehashed by Quentin Tarantino." Two years later, after it opened on Broadway, The New York Times pronounced the show "a spellbinding stunner" and "this season's most exciting and original new play."
For Mr. Kroft, playing Katurian "is a dream role" and working under Mr. Hamilton's direction means he's working with someone who has "a real understanding of McDonagh's work."
The college paper he wrote was about "the cultural conversation around the extent to which violent movies and video games potentially create people who go out and commit mass shootings. I used 'The Pillowman' as a literary reference to explore the scientific research that had been done around that. That's a big part of what the play is about -- to what extent is art responsible for the action that people commit in its name? . . . Words and stories are very, very powerful because of what they conjure for people and in people."
Mr. Gladstone compared Mr. McDonagh's work to Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus," with a "satirist's brutality."
"He tells stories that are so compellingly good they draw you in and they terrify you and they make you laugh, which further terrifies you -- why am I laughing at this?" Mr. Gladstone said. "But there's something cathartic. There's a parable, it's a story within a story within a story that contains layers of truth about the challenge of being a writer, being a creative, being a free thinker. All sorts of tropes that are turned on their ear and twisted. It will make you uncomfortable, but it will also make you think."
Showtimes are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 3 p.m.; Friday, May 3, at 7:30 p.m.; May 4 at 2 and 7:30, and May 5 at 7:30. General admission tickets cost $25 each. A link to buy tickets can be found online at ltveh.org.
