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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > June > 07
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Review: ‘KIller Joe’
Posters for Capital T Theatre’s production of “Killer Joe” at Hyde Park Theatre bill the play as a “very dark comedy.” In this case, there is truth in marketing. The company, led by director Mark Pickell, never shies from any of playwright Tracy Letts’s deeply unsettling writing. Nuanced, convincing performances from the cast and clear directing choices don’t allow the play’s comedy to overwhelm the gravity of its violence.
“Killer Joe” is a trailer park family drama, focused on the Smith family. The set, a trailer co-designed by Pickell and Tommy Grubbs, captures the family in detail: broken and lacking any order. Every time the family’s likeable, but inept father Ansel (Joe Reynolds) sits on the couch, he pulls dirty kitchen utensils from the cushions. When sassy, trampy stepmother Sharla (Katie DeBuys) serves dinner, the woven paper plate holders barely make it to the table in one piece. Pieces fall as Sharla walks.
The love between older brother Chris (Joey Hood) and mentally disabled Dottie (Melissa Recalde) seems the family’s only hope. Recalde aptly creates and manipulates Dottie’s robotic shell to reveal her as the family’s wise woman. The Smiths quickly entangle themselves in a web of bad choices. They hire contract murderer “Killer Joe” (Kenneth Wayne Bradley) and then put him on “retainer,” not with money, but with Dottie’s sexual companionship. It’s difficult to tell more of the plot without revealing the play’s secrets, but as Chris puts it late in the play “arrangements just kind of broke funny.”
The most uncomfortable of these broken arrangements is Joe’s relationship to the play’s women. He begins his romance with Dottie, coaxing her into sex by sending her back to memories of being a twelve-year old. Where softly disturbing silences characterize Joe elsewhere, with Sharla his sexual abuse is explosive and degrading.
Reynolds and DeBuys have the most opportunity to contrast the play’s violence against its comedy. Ansel’s inability to do anything right is reiterated with humor and detail. My favorite: As he exits with several beers in hand, we hear him drop several and curse offstage. DeBuys manages to convey subtext through only screams in the play’s most violent scenes, shifting from horror and fear to self-absorption.
‘Killer Joe’ continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through June 27. Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. $15-$25. www.capitalt.org.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
