Off-Broadway Theater Review: Ionesco's The Killer

Michael Shannon. Photo: Gerry Goodstein

The Killer
By Eugène Ionesco
Newly Translated: Michael Feingold
Featuring Kristine Nielsen, Michael Shannon, Paul Sparks, and Robert Stanton in a company of 20 actors.
Directed by Darko Tresnjak
Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn

A Puzzling Play, Where Humor Helps Put Together the Pieces
By Lauren Yarger
So what does a director who wins the Tony, Drama Desk, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle awards do in his spare time?

If you are Darko Tresnjak, Hartford Stage’s artistic director who just took all of those top directing honors for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, you direct a rarely seen Off-Broadway revival of Eugène Ionesco’s dark, absurdist comedy The Killer, getting a limited run as the season closer at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn.

The Killer was last produced Off-Broadway in 1960, perhaps because it’s not an easy work to produce (Ionesco’s Exit the King saw success on Broadway in 2009 when Geoffrey rush took home Tony for best actor in a play and seems much lighter and funnier to me.) When I ran into Tresnjak at a Drama Desk reception held during the rehearsal period for the play, he admitted that he was finding the process very difficult. The Killer was appropriately named, he joked.

Apparently he solved the puzzle of how to make this play work, because the production, starring Michael Shannon (“Revolutionary Road,” “Boardwalk Empire”), Kristine Nielsen (Vanya, Sonia, Masha & Spike, Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson) Paul Sparks (also “Boardwalk Empire) and Robert Stanton (a veteran stage actor whom you might know as the dad in the “Dennis the Menace” film), has been packing them in over at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn and whether or not the audience “gets it,” they’re definitely talking about it.

At the center of The Killer is Berenger (Shannon), Ionesco’s “every man” (the character who also gets the starring role in different portrayals in Exit the King, A Stroll in the Air and perhaps the best known of all of Ionesco’s plays, The Rhinoceros.)

Here, a downtrodden Berenger takes the wrong bus one day and discovers a city of light – a virtual paradise—where everything is clean, the gardens are lush and the sun shines perpetually. Lighting Designer Matthew Richards shines as he adds to the storytelling with effects that cast shadow on the less-than-Eden-like features of the paradise, evidenced by sewer grates and a creepy lagoon that appears on the dark set with rotating circles designed by Suttirat Larlarb (who also designs the costumes).

The Architect of this place (a comically adroit Robert Stanton) looks a bit familiar. He omnisciently listens to Berenger while chatting on his cell phone (the updated translation of Ionesco’s play is by Michael Feingold) and running a bureaucratic office with the assistance of Dennie (Stephanie Bunch), with whom Berenger falls in love at first sight.

There is a problem in this paradise – there is a killer on the loose and he is drowning people in that lagoon after showing them a picture of a colonel. Berenger is aided in his search for the killer by a mysterious (and quite funny) friend, Edward (Paul Sparks)

Highlight of the second act (there are three in all for just over three hours at the theater) is the appearance of a whacky (but dark, remember, this is Ionesco) concierge played by Kristine Nielsen, a favorite stage actress of mine who can make pushing a broom around seem like the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. She doesn’t disappoint here. She also plays Ma Piper, a totalitarian dictator dominating a political climate where protestors are rounded up by the police.

Shannon also gets a shining moment in a long monologue climax where he confronts the killer and tries to convince him that his actions are wrong.

Now, if you are looking for some answers about what this play is all about, let me direct you to Spark Notes. This type of theater is called absurd for a reason. Besides telling you there is a metaphor here for Original Sin and the fall of man as well as some references to the Occupy movement thanks to Feingold’s modernization of the text, there is a lot open to interpretation.

Tresnjak doesn’t try to answer the questions about life and death and purpose that are raised here, but instead focuses on the humor that helps us to ponder them. Good choice. Humor provides a way to fit the pieces of the puzzle together and if you run down to New York to see this limited run before it ends on June 29, you just might see the jigsaw come into focus.

The Killer runs through June 29 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, between Lafayette Avenue and Fulton Street, Brooklyn. Performances: Tuesday through Sunday evenings at 7:30 with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2. http://www.tfana.org/season-2014/killer/overview.

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