shout

The Pillowman is darker than your average black comedy.  It starts with a confused writer locked in an interrogation room with two hostile detectives who seem to want to torture and execute him because of his stories.  Then it becomes clear that most of the writer's stories are about terrible things happening to children, and that a recent series of murders in his town has followed the descriptions of murders in his stories very closely.  THEN it turns out that the writer's mentally handicapped brother is behind the murders, and he does not seem to realize the significance of what he has done.

So where does the funny part come in, exactly?

It's hard to say.  Most of the lines which seem hilarious in the play don't really seem that funny on their own.  But the play builds up so much horrifying tension that, when that tension is suddenly released a little bit, it seems very funny.

For instance, there's one scene in which the writer (Katurian Katurian, played by John Christensen '12) is being interrogated by Detectives Tupolski and Ariel (Wade Gobel '10 and Scott Donaldson '10), who want him to confess to the murders.  Ariel leaves the room, there is screaming, and he comes back with blood on his hands, informing Katurian that he has been torturing his brother (Michal, played by Geoff Williams '11).  Later, when Tupolski is mad at Ariel, he yells at him for using "obviously fake blood," while Katurian is still present in the room.  This is sort of funny on its own, but it is such a relief to know that Ariel hasn't really been torturing Michal that it ends up being much funnier than it would have been otherwise.

But even if The Pillowman does count as a comedy, none of its characters are the stock personages with easy-to-figure-out personalites that you usually find in comedies.  All four of the actors playing the main characters did great jobs of keeping the audience guessing when it came to who their characters really were.

John Christensen portrayed Katurian, the writer, mostly as a bright, friendly and idealistic storyteller who was very frightened and confused by the whole proceedings- the most sympathetic character of the bunch.  However, whenever Katurian or another character would read one of his disturbing stories, his face would light up in a way that was more than a little unsettling, given that most of the stories were about children dying gruesomely.  It was enough to make the audience think twice about whether Katurian was innocent.

Wade Gobel played the intimidating Detective Tupolski, who seems at the beginning to be distressingly stupid: he yells at Katurian for reading the folder that he placed in front of Katurian on the table, and when Katurian replies that he didn't mean to read it and only saw it with his peripheral vision, Tupolski yells at him some more, claiming that he would have had to have been sitting sideways for it to have been peripheral vision, and that there is no such thing as peripheral vision out of the bottom of your eyes.  Later, though, Ariel asks Tupolski what was up with "the peripheral vision thing," and Tupolski reveals that he has been acting deliberately asinine in order to scare Katurian.  For the rest of the play it's up in the air whether anything stupid-sounding Tupolski says is actually stupid or carefully planned out to sound stupid – but as it gets toward the end the latter seems more and more likely.

Then there's Detective Ariel, played by Scott Donaldson, whom we see in the first scene beating the crud out of Katurian.  From this introduction, he seems to be a fairly unsympathetic fellow, but as the story goes on, he starts to catch on to Katurian's innocence and tries to help him out, while Tupolski doesn't seem to care whether Katurian is innocent or not.  Ariel also gives a little monologue in which it is revealed that he desires above all else to capture people who hurt children, which casts him in a better light – and which Tupolski makes fun of him for.

Scott Donaldson's portrayal of Michal Katurian (brother of Katurian Katurian) was probably the most enigmatic of all – Michal is the murderer, but he is also a childlike mentally handicapped man who says he only committed the murders because he loves his brother's stories.  He is very sympathetic and innocent – which just makes the play creepier and harder to figure out.

And then, amidst all this horror and moral ambiguity, we have lines like this:

 It feels sort of wrong to be laughing at that sort of thing, but the actors delivered it so well that not laughing would have been a difficult feat indeed.  The good thing, though, is that after laughing about it, you are forced to think about what you just laughed at – and there's a lot to think about in The Pillowman.