Family plot

White trash, deep noir: Killer Joe puts the trailer park on stage

By Robert Avila

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Do you know the Smiths? The psychopathic Texas trailer-home family? Seems their boy, Chris (Ryan Montgomery), the drug dealer, comes home one day to ask his father, Ansel (Howard Swain), for some money. No surprise there. But some bad associates have threatened to kill Chris if he doesn't pay what he owes them. So when Ansel, with second wife Sharla (Stacy Ross), pleads no funds, Chris turns around and suggests they murder his mother (nobody likes her anyway) and collect the life insurance she's apparently designated for Chris's kid sister, Dottie (Anna Bullard), a pretty but strange girl, a 20-year-old virgin who says odd things, somnambulates, never was quite right. The Smiths are game. Chris knows of a full-time cop who moonlights as a hit man, a certain "Killer Joe" Cooper (Cully Fredricksen) – tall, lean, and mean-looking in black boots and a white cowboy hat. He shows up soon afterward to cut the deal. Of course when Joe finds out they don't have his money up front, the middle-aged assassin insists on a "retainer," in the form of little Miss Sleepwalker, Dottie. This, for the Smiths, sets things on a course from bad to worse.

Chicago playwright Tracy Letts's Killer Joe (1994) – an international hit that finally makes its Bay Area debut in a totally assured, full-bore production at Marin Theatre Company – is the first truly risky and entertaining production of 2006. Definitely worth the $5 bridge toll, it's also a sustained high note by MTC's outgoing artistic director, Lee Sankowich. Unapologetically sexual and violent (with Hollywood-respectable amounts of nudity and stage blood), Killer unfolds like a Coen brothers thriller, amid a poor-white world of inept schemers and genial sociopaths – intentionally cartoony but supplely drawn – awash in apathy, desperation, petty disputes, dumb dreams, and the usual low-budget accoutrements: greasy BVDs, junkyard decor, cheap beer, fast food, bad reception. It's a style Sankowich augments with a black-and-white neo-noir production scheme, in which Laura Hazlett's muted costumes and Giulio Cesare Perrone's grimy, gray-toned trailer – foregrounded by a sunken junk-strewn yard of dried weeds – make an ideal palette for setting off some bright red liquid. But making the most of it all by far is his remarkably astute and fearless ensemble cast.

The play has a literary flavor too, albeit one that tends to come out between the lines, in Dottie's sputtered dream-utterances and sly non sequiturs, or in vivid tableaux. When Sharla, for instance, roused from sleep and naked from the waist down, opens the door for stepson Chris, she responds to his Oedipal revulsion with the deadpan excuse, "Well, I didn't know who you were." The joke is doubly good when we realize Chris follows his umbrage at Sharla's poor sense of decorum with a matricidal proposition to his father. But the line reaches even further, well into the heart of Letts's macabre comedy with its slippery relationships and gleeful unsettling of the "natural" social order. Who here really knows who anyone is? Letts depicts a universe so irremediably crooked, wicked, and vicious that we're denied any moral certitudes: Joe is cop and killer, Dottie's lover and keeper, a bringer of death and new life; spacey Dottie, meanwhile, is also the sharpest of the Smiths, a seer of sorts, but one pinned in the gaze of Killer Joe ("his eyes hurt," as she repeatedly explains). Joe's gaze, in one of the play's more chillingly fascinating scenes, literally strips her bare and then refashions her. In another telling image, Dottie emerges from her room in a black party dress, her father's unwitting virgin sacrifice to a killer, as Ansel triumphantly drops a captured mouse into the teeth of the garbage disposal. But Dottie's fragility and status as victim also give way to surprising assertions of strength. And Ansel is both her persecutor and gentle childlike father, a nightmare and a hilariously sympathetic loser. Brother Chris, for his part, is her betrayer and would-be savior, an inept entrepreneur and a cold-blooded murderer, and so on. Without giving anything else away, suffice it to say that things slip into their seeming opposites so easily you have to wonder if they really are, properly, opposites at all.

The perverse parody at the heart of the play takes self-conscious form at one point as Joe viciously and sarcastically forces everybody, abused and terrified, to sit down to a nice quiet family dinner so he can announce his engagement to Dottie. And yet the moment also suggests the way the family both destroys and reproduces itself in a moral vacuum whose horror has to do with the ordinariness as well as the aberrance of it all. The Smiths: special case? Or ordinary Joes?

KILLER JOE Through Feb. 12 See Stage listings for dates and times Marin Theatre Company 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley (415) 388-5208 $29-$47 www.marintheatre.org