Friday evening Tim and I went to see The Pillowman at the St. Louis Rep. From the description on the site:
In a totalitarian state, a young man—butcher by day, aspiring writer by night—is detained and faces an interrogation by a cruel, corrupt detective about the gruesome content of his lurid fairy tales, the plots of which bear striking similarities to a number of horrific child murders happening in his town.
Based on that description, I was a little worried that the play would be too disturbing for me, but I decided to go because it was supposed to be really good. It turned out to be excellent.
The play is really about storytelling - it turns out that the main character filters his life through his stories, and gains courage from telling them. As the play unfolds, we discover that all the characters are storytellers in some way or another.
The set design reflects the themes of the play. The “real life” scenes are set in an interrogation room, which is completely utilitarian, featuring only a table, chairs, and filing cabinet on an essentially bare stage. But these scenes are interspersed with scenes of the main character telling his stories. The rear of the stage becomes another stage, framed with what looks like a decoration on a storybook. The sets for the stories are colorful and stylized, with bold lines and exaggerated angles. The actors are also dressed colorfully, and act out the stories with exaggerated motions as the writer tells them. The contrast works very well.
Quite a bit of meta is to be expected with a story about storytelling. One bit in particular made me laugh. The main character is telling a story to his mentally-handicapped brother, who interrupts to ask what aggravated means. The storyteller says it means annoyed or irritated and goes on. While I can’t be totally sure, I think this is a dig at overly-prescriptive editors, who insist (based on questionable etymology) that aggravate should only be used to mean worsen, with irritate reserved to mean annoy. (Note that the first page of Google results for “aggravate irritate” consists almost entirely of style guides making this prescription, with only one link referring to the actual etymology and supporting the use of aggravate for annoy. Linguists agree.)
The only criticism I had also involves the use of language; while I generally have no issue with the appropriate usage of Anglo-Saxon profanity, I don’t understand why fuck had to be used in what often seemed like every sentence, frequently many times per sentence. I can only assume that this was also some sort of statement, as no other words were overused to that extent, but I don’t get it.
Overall, it was a great production, and if anybody in St. Louis has a chance to check it out I’d recommend it.