Death Imitates Art

The good news: Laughter is the best medicine. The bad news: If you’re watching “The Pillowman,” you’re going to need it. Martin McDonagh’s Tony-nominated black comedy has many virtues, but a rejection of the nausea paradigm is not one of them. The Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s latest might make you sick, but only between restorative giggle fits, or in retrospect when you realize you’ve never seen gore employed as artistically as it is under Les Waters’ direction.

To be fair, there’s very little blood actually shown onstage. “The Pillowman” is the story of a horror writer named Katurian (Erik Lochtefeld) whose art—much of which involves children killed in disturbing ways—is imitated by life in a fictional police state. As such, when Katurian summarizes his stories during interrogation, their violence is described without explicit representation. In theory, what the audience imagines would be worse than anything they could see. In practice, some of the scenes are hard to watch without recoiling.

But it’s markedly more difficult to sit through a scene without cracking up and missing the next line. Tupolski (Tony Amendola), one of Katurian’s interrogators, manages to punctuate every exchange with a subtle sarcasm that underscores the dark humor of the play. His authoritative carriage occasionally reveals the character’s personal failings, and every time his superb timing makes us laugh, something darker and more sinister blossoms underneath what he says. His actions are straightforward and comprehensible on face, but occasionally Amendola allows this veneer to give way to the ugly, savage core at the heart of McDonagh’s work.

Tupolski’s depth is matched by Matthew Maher’s portrayal of Michal, Katurian’s brother. Michal is a young man with brain damage whose character could easily slide into caricature, but never does. Michal is funny without mocking his condition and sweet without being saccharine—though, as with Tupolski, the obvious is visible only because the truth is still in shadow.

Tupolski and Michal are just two of the inhabitants of “The Pillowman” who’ve barely survived the unending and inevitable torture of childhood. Every major character has suffered trauma in their youth. Strangely, Katurian has a preternatural ability to guess the nature of these events without any logical basis for doing so, though it could be a highly advanced form of artistic intuition. Still, in spite of Katurian’s immense—and apparently quasi-psychic—creative capacity, the horror of his stories pales in comparison to the play’s tragic reality. For McDonagh, life, even early life, is inescapable pain.

The only time “The Pillowman” sags is when Katurian tries for a new

optimism in the play’s final moments. Trust in his fellow man, as everything occurring previously has taught us, is always misplaced. But fortunately for Katurian and unfortunately for everyone in the audience, this empirically-proven conclusion is only half-wrong. While death is a strong presence throughout the piece, deliverance never is. When it appears in the form of unfettered artistic immortality, it only serves to weaken the premise of an otherwise brilliant work.

Early in the first act, Katurian tells Tupolski that the first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story. If this echoes the playwright’s personal feelings, McDonagh is quite a storyteller. His story is twisted and full of twists, disgusting and full of disgust. It’s poignant but drenched in bodily fluids, hurled into the abstract but still down-to-earth. At times gruesome, at times hilarious, always relevant, “The Pillowman” might spin your stomach. But if McDonagh’s right, and he probably is, then a little discomfort is just what we need.

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