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by Tracy Letts, directed by Peter Pasyk

Coal Mine Theatre, Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

April 3-24, 2016

Dottie: “My momma tried to kill me when I was real little.  She put a pillow over my face and tried to stop me breathing, ‘cause she cared more about herself than her little baby”

When you sit down to watch Tracy Letts’s play Killer Joe, get ready for a wild ride.  Just imagine The Glass Menagerie as if it were rewritten by Quentin Tarantino.  Letts, of course, is most famous for his large-scale Pulitzer Prize-winning family play August: Osage County from 2007.  Killer Joe from 1993 is his first play, but it looks forward to A:OC – it’s just that the verbal barbs from the later play show up as onstage sex and violence in Killer Joe.  For its Toronto premiere the Coal Mine Theatre gives the show a thrilling production that features an extraordinary performance by Matthew Edison in the title role.     

The action is set among the white trailer park trash of Dallas in the 1990s.  A 22-year-old drug dealer, Chris Smith (Matthew Gouveia) owes a criminal $6000.  His mother has kicked him out of her house so he goes to to the trailer of his father Ansel (Paul Fauteux), hoping to find shelter and help with the money.  Ansel has divorced Chris’s mother and has married Sharla (Madison Walsh), a woman Chris thinks is too slutty in dress and manner.  Chris is convinced the only hope of getting the money is to have his mother killed and collect on her $50,000 life insurance policy of which Chris’s sister Dottie (Vivien Endicott-Douglas) is the sole beneficiary. 

To do the job, Chris has learned of a certain Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew Edison), a former policeman who now does the occasional hit.  The problem is that Killer Joe demands his fee of $25,000 in advance.  Chris and Ansel don’t have the $6000 so they can hardly afford his services.  But Killer Joe, struck by the innocence of Dottie, suggests that the father and son give him Dottie as his “retainer”.  Since this is a pitch black comedy, everything that could possibly go wrong, does go wrong. 

White trailer park trash is, of course, too easy a topic for satire.  Yet in Letts’s hands these miserable lives become a reflection of the decline of American society in general.  In The Glass Menagerie (1945), the Wingfield family is still animated by the American Dream.  The father may have left but the mother carries on trying to sell it in the form of subscriptions to a ladies’ magazine over the phone.  In Killer Joe, simple survival has taken the place of any overarching Dream.  The American celebration of the individual has turned into the survival of the fittest or smartest or worse, the survival of whoever has a gun.  The conservative notion of the nuclear family as the building block of society is exploded when we see that each member is scheming against the other and will change loyalties in order not to be on the losing side. 

In The Glass Menagerie Tom Wingfield sought escape by going to the movies for long stretches every day.  Now with television anyone in the family can turn the set on and their minds off.  An especially grotesque reference to Tennessee Williams’ play is Killer Joe himself.  His entire manner is like that of a gunslinger of Western of the 1940s and ‘50s.  The last name Cooper is no accident since his gentlemanly manner and curt but courteous speech is very like that of Gary Cooper.  He is, however, clad all in black, rather like the murderous conman played by Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (1955) and one never knows when his outward civility with suddenly turn to violence. 

This is the “gentleman caller” of the play.  Chris and Ansel set him up on a date with the mentally damaged Dottie and they both encourage her to look her prettiest for him.  The prime difference here versus Williams is that this gentleman caller has sex with Dottie and accepts her as part of a financial deal.  While Tom in Williams and Chris in Letts both love their sisters, Letts suggests heavily that Chris’s love is not merely brotherly.

Set and lighting designer Patrick Lavender has recreated the grungy interior of a poorly kept trailer almost too well, with piles of dirty dishes in the kitchen, a sofa fixed with packing tape and a corner black with dirt from never having been swept.  Sound designer Christopher Stanton has found the right mix of televangelist shows, game shows, and old detective programs that make up Ansel’s TV viewing diet along with the kung-fu movies and Roadrunner cartoons that Dottie likes.  Roadrunner is particularly apt since the coyote maybe wily but never gets what he wants. 

Director Peter Pasyk draws top-notch performances from the entire cast.  The greatest surprise is casting Matthew Edison as Killer Joe.  Edison has played in so many comedies and so well that is exciting to see him show off a completely different side of his talent.  He is absolutely mesmerizing.  His pantherine movements suggest a man in complete control of his actions but who can burst out in violence in a split-second.  Edison speaks in a low tone of calm but steely authority.  Only when Joe has been living among the Smiths for a while does Edison allow traces of anger or disgust to enter his tone.  Edison’s Joe is brilliant and frightening all at once.

Vivien Endicott-Douglas gives perhaps her best ever performance as Dottie.  Mentally damaged from near asphyxiation as a child, Dottie, now 20, appears both innocent and knowledgeable.  Endicott-Douglas fully embodies this doll-like character who seems to live in a dreamworld most of the time, yet a world where she is unperturbedly aware of the nefarious plots being hatched around her.  Like Edison, she, too, hints that her character’s calmness hides a dangerous unpredictability.

Matthew Gouveia’s Chris is the loser of all losers.  Dim-witted and hungry for control, Gouveia shows that Chris’s very hunger blinds him to how he is constantly being used.  The one good thing in Chris’s life is Dottie, but Gouveia makes us wonder whether even that goodness is tainted.  Paul Fauteux, unrecognizable in a full beard, shows that Ansel is a man who has passed beyond Chris’s phase of ambition, if, in fact, he ever had any.  Ansel is a coward in life and in one painful moment, Fauteux reveals that Ansel is all too aware of his cowardice.  Madison Walsh, provocatively costumed as Sharla by Jenna McCutchen, at first appears as a typical trailer park bimbo.  Yet, Walsh makes us feel that Sharla is smirking at everyone around her and noticeably reacts more cooly to new information than does Chris or Ansel.  By this means Walsh intimates that Sharla has already mentally divorced herself from her husband and step-children.

We sense that the situation of Letts’s characters will go from bad to worse, but nothing quite prepares us for the violence and utter chaos of the conclusion.  In the latter half of the play scenes of male humiliation of women are almost too disturbing to watch.  Pasyk has paced the action to alternate periods of increasing tensions with comic release while maintaining an increasing atmosphere of uneasiness that finally explodes at the end. 

In Killer Joe, Letts is clearly continuing the project of Mamet and Shepard in revealing the hollowness of the concept of the American Dream.  Letts’s satire takes the concept to its logical extreme where the ideal of rugged individualism becomes just an excuse for animal savagery.  We have to wonder what kind of place Letts’s America has become when the man in the black hat is the one with the strictest morality.  It’s a question that is still disturbing.                              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Matthew Edison (standing), Paul Fauteux, Madison Walsh, Vivian Endicott-Douglas and Matthew Gouveia; Matthew Gouveia and Paul Fauteux; Matthew Edison. ©2016 Matt Campagna.

For tickets, visit www.coalminetheatre.com/tickets.