2001

Killer Joe
by Tracy Letts

Brink Productions
with State Theatre Company
Space, June 2001

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Brink Productions are back, this time in co-production with State Theatre, for Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe, a grim little dog-eat-rottweiler saga about the Smith family.

Buried alive in a trailer park on the margins of Dallas, Texas, are Ansel and his second wife Sharla, and, from a previous marriage, son Chris and twelve year old daughter Dottie. Chris, in deep to a loan shark named Digger Soames, hatches a plan to restructure his finances by taking out a contract on his own mother in the hope of collecting the insurance. Ansel has no qualms about murdering his ex-wife, nor do Sharla and Dottie. So, enter Killer Joe Cooper, homicide detective and freelance hitman. But far from providing a final solution, the Mephistophlean Joe ensures that the family tribulations become exponential.

Letts’s text is a hideous account of desperate underclass amorality, which, while apparently leavened by black comedy, is finally a poignant testimony to the entitlements of the innocent. When Chris plan goes haywire and he discovers that Dottie is not the beneficiary of their mother’s insurance, the yet-to-be-paid Killer Joe, with the inexorable logic of the debt collector, keeps the child as collatoral,- or as he says, on “retainer”- as his sex slave in perpetuity.

The family is bad enough, preying on each other for whatever advantage they can derive, but Killer Joe is organised depravity, the embodiment of the poverty trap with, as Dottie says, “eyes that hurt.” The family is doomed to spiral down. It is just as Chris explains to Dottie – of the cartoon coyote on the perpetually blaring television – “ He doesn’t catch the bird, he just goes on and on.”

In Brink’s production, directed by Hannah Macdougall, the Space is crammed with a dilapidated trailer with a peeled back roof. The tin-opener motif in the set by Gaelle Mellis is somewhat obviously signified as is the squalor of the living space, strewn with fast food litter, busted TV sets and other detritus. And initially Macdougall allows the actors, particularly Elizabeth Falkland and David Mealor as Sharla and Ansel to overplay the trailer trash stereotypes. But things start to consolidate in the creepy scenes between Rory Walker, unnervingly matter-of-fact as Joe, and Michaela Cantwell, convincing as the ingenuous child Dottie. William Allert is accomplished as Chris, whose recognition of his abysmal fate has more than a ration of pity and fear.

Killer Joe has had numerous performances since it opened in the US in 1993. That is because, while Letts appears to be unleashing a Jerry Springer freakshow, he has in fact created characters who are not beyond redemption even if they are beyond hope. There are elements of Tennessee Williams here – particularly in the depiction of Dottie – and the concluding scene, simulating oral rape with a fried chicken drumstick is both theatrically shocking and symbolically macabre. This is not, however, an “only-in-America story” – especially as, in our own city, very similar plotlines have been turning up in barrels. Brink Productions in Hannah Macdougall’s production is a strong one and it works best when we are reminded of the humanness of the characters and not just their monstrosity.

“Liquidating assets” The Adelaide Review, No.214, July, 2001, p.26