Miscreant Theatre Collective production of Martin McDonagh’s shocking play kicks off spooky season in gruesome fashion

One doesn’t go into a Martin McDonagh play expecting rainbows and unicorns, and his 2003 play The Pillowman may be the darkest thing he’s written. Now showing at the Creepatorium in a Miscreant Theatre Collective production, The Pillowman is a well-done horror story that comes with every kind of content warning you can think of.

Set in an unspecified police state, the show opens on a story writer named Katurian sitting in a chair with a sack over his head. His hands aren’t bound, and when two cops come in to interrogate him, they ask why he hasn’t removed the sack.

“I didn’t think I was supposed to,” he says.

“It just looks stupid,” the female cop Tupulski tells him.

So begins a series of abuse both verbal and physical that has the disconcerting element of humor built in. If the notion of finding yourself laughing at torture or child abuse is somehow less than appealing, this one definitely isn’t for you. But The Pillowman is an intriguing script, with McDonagh rummaging around in the horrific fairy tales of the past to create something that’s truly unique and terrifying.

Director Veronica Straight-Lingo is working with an excellent cast and production team here, and staging the play in the warehouse-y Creepatorium on Acoma Street in South Denver was a neat idea. The address is for the HORRID horror shop, but the actual venue is around the back of the building. Adjacent to the performance space is a horror-themed café called Scr3am & Sugar, which is open during the performances.

It’s an ideal setting for The Pillowman, and Miscreant doesn’t disappoint.

Liam Broadhurst as Katurian and Alison Talvacchio as Tupulski in ‘The Pillowman’ | Photo: Xander S. Trullinger

Good Bad cop, bad cop

Katurian is expertly played with gritty befuddlement by Liam Broadhurst. At first acting utterly confused as to why he’s been arrested, Katurian is pressed by the two cops to review some of the messed-up plot lines in his stories. He’s written over 400 of them, with only one published, so he works in the local slaughterhouse to make ends meet. The cops are interested in him because a number of his works contain depictions of child abuse and murder very similar crimes being investigated in the city.

Broadhurst depicts Katurian as a regular guy who just happens to write horrifying stories. He acts like the cops are grilling him over the Oxford comma rather than the meaning behind a story where a child has his toes chopped off. It’s the split between his aw-shucks attitude and his obvious psychosis that makes for a performance you can’t look away from.

McDonagh’s powerful script uses reenactments of some of these stories to drive the action, and many others are mentioned in passing. “The Pillowman,” for instance, is a character who visits people on the verge of suicide. He travels back in time to convince them to just kill themselves while they’re children instead of having to suffer through all the stuff that leads them to suicide as adults.

Charming.

Another chilling story that’s one of the reenactments is “The Little Apple Men.” This one’s about a girl who carves little men out of apples and sticks razor blades in them. She tells her father, who has of course been mistreating her, not to eat them.

Spoiler alert: He does. But in The Pillowman, the story doesn’t end there, and the girl has something quite the opposite of a happily ever after.

Liam Broadhurst and Andy Slimrod in ‘The Pillowman’ | Photo: Xander S. Trullinger

The interrogation room

In between expressing amazement over Katurian’s terrible stories, Tupulski and the other cop, Ariel (Andy Slimrod) relish tormenting him even before they’ve proven any link between the stories and the crimes. These key roles are done beautifully by the two actors. Talvacchio plays Tupulski as a ground-down bureaucrat of a cop who effects the “good cop” mantle as she ignores Ariel breaking every rule in the book dealing with Katurian (at one point, a portable car battery charger makes an appearance).

Ariel’s own terrible childhood fuels his hatred of Katurian, and Slimrod is downright scary as the explosive thug who can’t help wearing his own wounded heart on his sleeve.

The cast is rounded out by Rita Maria, who plays Katurian’s younger brother Michal, and Aspen K. Somers handling the child roles in the reenactments. Maria has a bombastic role to handle with a lot of screaming that could’ve been toned down a bit. Otherwise, they do a good job with a wildly conflicted character you’re never quite sure to believe or not (mostly not, turns out).

Somers is superb managing the mostly non-speaking kid roles. Poker-faced most times, she really shines in the longest reenactment of a particularly twisted story titled “Little Jesus.” I’ll leave that description for you to experience yourself, along with another wild one, created on the spot by Tupulski and involving a Chinese wise man in a tower.

Rita Maria and Liam Broadhurst in ‘The Pillowman’ | Photo: Xander S. Trullinger

Setting the scene

This production of The Pillowman features a great many nicely done technical details that bolster the fascinating script and powerful acting. The lighting design by Emily Maddox is an eerie blend of blues, blacks and purples that mirror the action perfectly while keeping everyone lit in every position.

Straight-Lingo handled the sound design, alongside which is an original score by Dillon McDonald that’s highly impactful — particularly in some of the most frightening scenes. The minimalist set design attributed to the Collective functions well and includes a ramp down center that brings the action right into the aisle between the two seating areas. An old-school TV is connected to a camera showing another angle on the interrogation, and it’s also used to great effect to show Katurian being worked over by Ariel in another location.

The Creepatorium is a bit of a cavern, and the sound team does a fine job balancing things out. Its live walls, however, create an echo chamber for voices that cause any shouting to be super-sized. Anger doesn’t necessarily require volume, and managing those performance aspects better is one of the only negatives that stood out to me.

This was my first time seeing a show by Miscreant, and I was impressed by the quality of the entire production. It’s hard to think of a better way to get primed for Halloween than by taking a trip to The Creepatorium to check this one out.