Every set designer for Off-Off-Broadway should drop what he’s doing and attend a performance of Astoria Performing Arts Center’s production of The Pillowman, which features a brilliant, all-purpose set from designer Stephen K. Dobay. Actually, everyone should drop what he’s doing for a subway ride to Queens, because it seems that shivery, riveting theater has abandoned Manhattan to take up residence in the other boroughs.
The play itself is already acknowledged as excellent (though Doubt beat it for the Tony for Best Play), but more surprising is what the scrappy APAC has managed to accomplish with it. The company has turned what could have easily been a community-theater-take on Martin McDonagh’s Tony-nominated black comedy from 2005 into an exquisitely cast, almost perfectly realized theater lover’s dream: a three-hour play that transcends both its length and uncomfortable folding chairs.
Called in by the police of the unnamed totalitarian state in which he lives (the words are British, but the accents are American), writer Katurian (Avery Clark) and his older brother Michael (Nathan Brisby) are questioned and then tortured for details regarding the deaths of three children, all of whom were murdered in grisly, elaborate ways similar to those in Katurian’s unpublished short stories. That may be the bare bones plot, but like any good storyteller, McDonagh tosses in enough red herrings to render any brief synopsis far less than the sum of its parts.
Director Tom Wojtunik, who staged APAC’s lauded Ragtime last year, has somehow managed to assemble a cast not only willing to work in Astoria, but uniformly talented—something that most recent plays have been lacking. He has a firm grasp of not only the play’s dark vision of the world (one of Katurian’s stories involves a little girl being forced to swallow razor-filled apples), but also the bleak comedy laced throughout. Several times, gasps in the audience morphed into chuckles at the banality of evil.
But what else can one do but laugh at state-sanctioned torturers who wonder aloud about grammar during interrogations, or use circuitous conversations as a way of disorienting their suspects? Or the childlike Michael, whose one big concern regarding his potentially upcoming execution is that he might not have another chance to nap?
Of course, all the talent in the world couldn’t help Wojtunik stage this particular play if his cast wasn’t up to it. And they are. As the interrogators, Seth Duerr and Richard D. Busser offer new takes on the good-cop, bad-cop routine. Duerr hilariously delivers his lines with the prickly, misguided complacency of David Hyde Pierce, earning laughs even as he reassures Katurian that he’ll shoot him in the head in half an hour; Busser explodes periodically, but always a beat or two off, giving his character the off-kilter aspect of a deranged killer. Which he may or may not be.
And Brisby is a marvel in the play’s showiest part. Walking a fine line between comedy and pathos, he never falls into the trap of playing a mentally disabled person as a cliché-riddled joke. Just as the audience has settled in for a gruesome good time, watching the two brothers fight the injustice of the police force, he renders them speechless with a casual observation that turns the whole play—and the audience’s expectations—on its head.
The real gem of the show, though, is Avery Clark. On stage for almost the entire play’s duration, and given multiple lengthy, complicated monologues as he recounts Katurian’s stories, Clark is nothing short of magnetic. His Katurian is a slightly dim, ingratiating man who practically grovels in his helpfulness when first brought in for questioning. But he has a calm, deluded self-assurance in his own abilities, dramatically informing Michael that given the choice, he’d let the two of them be executed in exchange for the promised safety of his 400 short stories. He’s as wanly smug as everyone else on stage is, and when his smugness is questioned, his face distorts into a mask of ugly hatred. Alone in the world with his mentally disturbed brother (the fate of their parents is deliciously revealed in a moment that recalls the equally baroque Shockheaded Peter), Katurian is proof that, as Joan Didion wrote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And the “fashionably downbeat ending” (a phrase Katurian relishes) of The Pillowman is that sometimes the stories we tell ourselves can become our undoing. The Pillowman itself, however, is a welcome reminder that there are good stories still being told on New York stages. Even if that stage happens to be in Queens.
> The Pillowman
Through Nov. 21 at the Good Shepherd Methodist Church, 30-44 Crescent St. (betw. 30th Dr. & 30th Rd.), Queens, 868-811-4111; times vary, $15 in advance, $18 at the door.
