The Pillowman On The Couch

Joseph Campbell once pointed out that your real midlife crisis happens between the ages of 30 and 35, living past 70 being a relatively recent event. At 35 you have the accoutrements of home and family, community standing, and realize with a sudden sickening shock there's no way out of it: you've become your parents. (Okay, in theory. In reality, you're probably doing less well than your parents, comparatively.)

35-ish playwright Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, which just opened at ACT (and runs through April 16), is what you'd expect from the author of Beauty Queen of Leenane and A Skull in Connemara: grim, viciously funny, horrifying, and otherwise "fashionably downbeat." (Like any good Irish song.)

We don't know why we're even plugging it. It's the show Seattle is dying to see. The Stranger wants to go, the Seattle Times, the P-I, it's what's for dinner (if your dinner is 2 hours, 45 minutes long).

It won't surprise you that with a main character named Katurian K. Katurian, who's being grilled by a totalitarian dictatorship's police force for a crime he's unaware of, the play has Kafka-esque elements (and even a joke about "-esque" appellations). There's been a good deal of critical parsing of "the role of the artist in today's society" and the "ethical implications of torture," but the play's task is redeeming the experience of child abuse, negotiating with childhood trauma in order to live as an adult. To delve so deeply into a taboo topic, McDonagh uses both a childish tool and an adult one: he tells horror-story fairytales and lays the cynic's black humor on thickly.

Borrowing a page from Mamet, he also decorates the fucking script with some fucking bad fucking language. Gritty. Coarse. The audience at ACT loved it all, walking the tightrope of abuse metaphors that suck the wind out of you, above a net of reflexive, acid irony -- and amid little grenades of joking asides that spark gales of laughter, get your lungs working again. Under Kurt Beattie's direction, the cast is uniformly excellent at tossing the verbal munitions back and forth.

Tickets are $10 for the under-25 crowd, and $54 for the rest of you. (There's a Pay What You Can performance tomorrow, March 25, at 2pm.) $54 is pricey, but on a per-hour basis, it works out to about the same as paying $30 to see the 90-minute 9 Parts of Desire at the Rep. Buy tickets online or by calling 206-292-7676.

More than anything, The Pillowman echoes the work of Alice Miller, whose books The Drama of the Gifted Child and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware attempt to tie dissociated childhood trauma to both the cyclic nature of abuse and the rise of totalitarian dictatorships. Her thesis is that when children "split off" trauma from conscious experience, they're blind to that behavior in themselves, and in society's leaders as well.

In McDonagh's play, the writer Katurian's dissociation is lampooned by his insistence that there's nothing "behind" his writing 400 short stories of which about 398 feature young children being gruesomely tortured, mutilated, and killed. Matthew Floyd Miller as Katurian is so earnestly sincere and eager-to-please, you almost believe him. The good cop/bad cop team interrogating him (Denis Arndt and R. Hamilton Wright) aren't so easily persuaded.

The pair make a wonderful odd couple; Denis Arndt's Detective Tupolski is an inscrutable, Rumsfeldian marvel, and R. Hamilton Wright's Ariel is an update of the dogged Inspector Javert with a PTSD anger-management issue. We were less impressed with Shawn Telford's Michal, Katurian's "backward" brother, but we're inclined to fault McDonagh for the character's uneven IQ. Michal's ass-itch, in contrast, is eminently believable.

The Pillowman's dramatic teeter-totter comes down to whether Katurian is his stories or not, whether the person becomes the trauma, owes their identity to accident. The resolution is life-or-death.

Incidentally, psychologist Steven Pinker (who is not in the play, we hastily add) argues that our innate organizational structures are why we are who we are. Certainly we're affected by circumstance, but McDonagh was destined to have his sense of humor. Circumstance is what he's able to make fun of.