Hilarious 'Killer Joe' is foray into pulp satire
 |
|
||||||||||
|
If you are offended by caricatures of clueless, crude, amoral, beer-swilling Texans who live in ratty trailer parks and whose idea of gourmet fare is a tub of greasy fast food, don't go anywhere near "Killer Joe," an Empty Space Theatre production that wallows flagrantly in déclassé Americana.
And if you're squeamish about stage blood, nudity and violent men doing unspeakable things with chicken drumsticks ... well, this also may not be the show for you.
Yet in its own shameless, sometimes hilarious and occasionally chilling fashion, this well-traveled Tracy Letts' potboiler is another American foray into pulp satire - that is, taking our worst national traits and supersizing them.
Frame the Empty Space's well-oiled West Coast premiere staging of "Killer Joe'' as a theatrical foray into the genre, and it's pretty entertaining - even if it ain't at all pretty.
Dysfunction doesn't begin to describe the scummy clan and its Texas trailer home, which is realized in every seedy detail by designer Peggy McDonald - from the hideous light fixtures and green-stained kitchenette cabinets, to the "I am the NRA'' magnet on the beer-stocked fridge.
The cloddish patriarch here is Ansel (played by Ian Bell), a grease monkey with very bad judgment in women and the moral courage of a hubcap.
His current mate, Sharla (Shelley Reynolds, wonderfully trashed-up in Allison Leach's enjoyable costumes), is a tarty shrew who doesn't mind Ansel's childlike, seemingly docile 20-year-old daughter Dottie (Jen Taylor).
But Sharla can't abide Dottie's older, screw-up of a brother Chris (Matt Ford), a chronic underachiever in trouble with his unfriendly local dope dealer.
"Killer Joe" wires this quartet to a harebrained, murder-insurance plot that entangles them with an archetypal interloper: Joe (Kelly Boulware), a handsome, scary, corrupt cop with a murder-for-hire business on the side.
Joe is one smooth psycho, who'll take his fee in sex and mayhem if he can't get it in cash. But divulging any more plot details would spoil the best thing about Letts' script: the little twitches of surprise and lurid double-crosses that keep the sordid saga clicking.
Director M. Burke Walker (who dubs this play "white-trash noir") and his capable cast (especially Boulware, Taylor and Reynolds) bring this squalid caper off smartly, with a feel for detail that extends to how people fork up their tuna casserole.
Letts knows how to structure a thriller, and he also has a smart ear for dialogue. Some of his tastier Harold Pinter-meets-Quentin Tarantino exchanges achieve a hard-boiled American absurdism that's both funny and eerie.
But occasionally "Killer Joe" reaches for psychological resonance, and there it falters. The dialogue gives rather clunky hints of harrowing, Oprah-esque childhood traumas that just keep on giving. More effective are the shivers of dark eroticism between Boulware's demonic, seductive Joe and Taylor's spacey but not-so-dumb Dottie.
After sustaining its theatrical adrenalin, "Killer Joe" halts abruptly following a (predictably) bloody climax. In any event, one probably shouldn't read too much into this little thriller, after the laughter fades. Though European critics may find in it a true portrait of crass, Texas-style domesticity, it's really part of that hardy American tradition of taking sleaze to comic extremes.
Misha Berson can be reached at mberson@seattletimes.com.