An army of one
Ted Kaczynski Killed People with Bombs is entertaining, but doesn't dig much deeper than the title.

By Robert Avila

I DON'T SEEM to get interested in the big "lone killer" stories until after they're concluded, if at all. I've barely followed the D.C. sniper story beyond the headlines, and it was that way with O.J. It only got interesting when the nation reacted to the verdict, dividing itself so neatly along the color line that it demonstrated like nothing else I remember just how differently African Americans and whites saw the country they lived in. (Many attributed the difference to delusions on one side or the other, but to me the meaning was straightforward: most blacks do live in a different country from middle- and upper-class whites.)

Ted Kaczynski was another. Back when all the story amounted to was a single psychopath sending the occasional booby-trapped package, I had difficulty keeping up. But after he was captured and the papers revealed (however opaquely) just who the Unabomber was, it was time to ruminate on what it might tell us about ourselves. Kaczynski didn't fit the standard serial killer profile. He killed from a distance, he immersed himself in the project full time (he wasn't a weekender like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer), and he got no sadistic sexual pleasure from it. He was after revenge. And he had a manifesto.

But why does any serial killer fascinate? After all, the world is full of willful violence against innocent people, most of it barely noted, or perpetrated with an air of legitimacy – as in wars, environmental pollution, labor conditions, and other economic arrangements – yet those categorized as serial killers (always individuals, never a government or corporation) seem to many the ultimate in evil, each a special case. One expert, interviewed in Salon, notes that such killers almost never harm anyone in their circle of acquaintances. "Somehow they have this incredible ability to dehumanize strangers," he explains, "so they can do anything they want to them with moral impunity."

What, you might ask, is so incredible about that?

Perhaps the real difference, and the reason we are drawn to serial killers, is they are "nobodies" who, acting on dehumanized murder fantasies, usurp the ultimate prerogative of the powerful. For all the ways the Unabomber doesn't fit the usual taxonomies, that urge to turn the tables lies at the heart of Michelle Carter's Ted Kaczynski anyway.

We are already in Kaczynski's lair as the play starts. He's working diligently at a table at the back of the stage, under a single point of light. A muted, chthonic soundtrack rumbles, as if a metal band two floors below were jamming with a didgeridoo. All around Kate Boyd's set, loose, oversize pages from the infamous manifesto hang suspended in the middle of some chaotic explosion of paper. Amid these pages are ones bearing the famous police sketch of a curly-haired man in sunglasses and a hood (which, if it looked like anyone, brought to mind comic singer "Weird Al" Yankovic.

From this eerie opening image, we meet Mrs. Kaczynski (Anne Darragh) in a pained and careful interview with the FBI that will lead to the arrest of her son. "It's not what you people ask, it's what you don't ask that troubles me," she finally tells them. "You need someone to tell you what the important questions are." There follows a series of episodes pointing to seven possible "explanations" for Ted – narrated in part by a fictitious temptress and chanteuse representing "wild nature" (Celia Shuman), muse and sole companion to Kaczynski's fervid thoughts and schemes. They begin with childhood and include mental illness, Berkeley, Harvard, and an unrequited infatuation named Ellen. A wise and satirical portrait of Kaczynski, played with intelligence and a haunted charm by Merle Kessler, emerges as a man who is frustrated and deeply alienated, yet inseparable from a problematic, even absurd network of immediate and remote relationships.

Carter, creator of 2000's Hillary and Soon-Yi Shop for Ties, has a knack for imaginative encounters, witty yet realistic dialogue, and songs that (while not always energetically pursued here) are frisky and lean. Her tendency is to cover a bit too much ground, however. The segments devoted to the packaging of the Unabomber "story," while perhaps inevitable, are also the most predictable. And a comical bit devoted to the police sketch is humorous but largely superfluous, especially in a play that feels overly long. But the episodic story line, with its shifting focus on Kaczynski, his mother and brother (Mark Rafael Truitt), and at least one of his victims, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter (played with admirable force and depth by David Cramer), allows for some compelling character studies and a theme that reaches beyond the essentialized lone madman, himself conveniently dehumanized.

After all the "right" questions have been asked, Ted Kaczynski proves no more reducible than any of us; and in that commonality there's an unsettling mixture of anxiety and hope.

'Ted Kaczynski Killed People with Bombs' runs through Nov. 10. Wed.-Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m. (also Thurs/3, Sun/10, 7:30 p.m.), Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, S.F. $17-$50. (415) 441-8822.