Bay Area premiere overflows
with sex, blood and laughs

Robert Hurwitt | Chronicle Theater Critic
Thursday, January 19, 2006

Sex and violence are not standard fare at the Marin Theatre Company, let alone nudity, transgressive seductions, casual mayhem and buckets of blood. "Killer Joe," in its long overdue Bay Area premiere, has all of that and more -- incisively outrageous comedy, in-your-face attitudes and something serious to say. With the last production he'll stage as artistic director, Lee Sankowich is making Marin the place to go for edgy, risk-taking, dynamic theater.

Tracy Letts' dark trailer-trash comedy of casual sex and even more casual killings was a substantial hit off-Broadway in 1998, in a production that starred Scott Glenn (in the title role) and Amanda Plummer. Sankowich's version, which opened Tuesday, is every bit as bold and disturbing, but very different. Where Wilson Milam's New York staging reveled in the script's outrageous comedy, and more successfully evoked its physically claustrophobic setting, Sankowich and his accomplished cast find new layers of stunted humanity and even empathy in the tale.

"Joe" is a Sam Shepard scenario acted out by people whose ability to think is stunted, David Mamet-style, by their severely limited language skills. But it's Shepard and Mamet put through a Jacobean blood-and-guts wringer, with more than a touch of Road Runner cartoon mayhem. As directed by Sankowich, it's also an exciting exercise in stage noir.

The palette of black, white and shades of gray in Giulio Cesare Perrone's set and Laura Hazlett's costumes makes the spurts of blood all the more unsettling and compelling. It also helps highlight the shades of character evoked by the actors, from Cully Fredricksen's masterfully ruthless, unfailingly businesslike, cold-blooded rogue cop to the luckless members of the Smith family who hire him to kill a relative.

The Smiths are Letts' vision of an all-American family, trailer park denizens on the outskirts of Dallas. They're people with few options to begin with who've lessened their chances with a steady diet of dumbed-down popular culture -- a factor beautifully encapsulated in Howard Swain's portrait of the father, Ansel, who can't seem to glance in the direction of the buzzing TV on the floor without becoming mesmerized.

The one drawback in the Marin production is that Sankowich and Perrone haven't echoed the mental limitations in the physical setting. Instead of Letts' cramped trailer, they make full use of the broad stage for an unreasonably spacious, if strikingly detailed, shack full of tacky, scrounged furniture and ornamental hubcaps in a yard full of old car parts and desiccated weeds. Norman Kern's junkyard-dog sound effects and Michael Palumbo's moody lights join with the smudged gray cabinets and Hazlett's soiled costumes to counteract the spacious effect.

The action begins in a confrontationally comic mode, with a midnight face-off between a bladder-bursting Chris (Ryan Montgomery), Ansel's son, and his half-naked stepmother Sharla (Stacy Ross in the Plummer role). Ross is a vision of hard-bitten and sharp-tongued, manipulative sluttiness. Montgomery is perfect as the drug-fuzzy but mortally desperate young man whose life is in danger from yet another drug deal gone wrong.

With a mind-blown, slovenly Swain slowly grasping the idea, Chris lays out a plan to hire Dallas homicide detective, and hit man on the side, Killer Joe (Fredricksen) to help them tap into Chris' mother's life insurance policy. Joe insists on payment up-front, though, but is willing to accept a retainer in the form of Chris' pretty but brain-damaged sister Dottie, a child-woman played with luminously riveting seriousness by Anna Bullard.

Nothing goes quite as planned. As the murder plot spins out of control, "Joe" spices its outrageous comedy with layers of insidious menace, unsettling sex and outbursts of raw violence. Fredricksen sets the underlying tone with a performance full of feral cunning and intimations of bottomless pits of mayhem barely contained by a surface calm.

Menace and perversity infuse a magnetic, uncomfortable but inescapably erotic seduction. Blatant carnality heightens the horror and outrage of one violent outburst. If Joe is always the most potentially explosive character around, almost everyone else -- except hapless Ansel -- seems capable of some act of violence. And Swain, in one of his most brilliantly comic performances yet, embodies the hopelessness of an entire class just in the act of trying to empty his pockets. The climax of the play is a testament to the skills of the entire cast and those of fight director Christina Traister.

If it's taken a long time for "Joe" to get here, that's partly a testament to the play's unsettling qualities. It took it five years to get to off-Broadway. Given a production of this quality, it's been well worth the wait.