KILLER JOE by Tracy Letts, directed by Peter Pasyk, with Matthew Edison, Vivian Endicott-Douglas, Paul Fauteux, Matthew Gouveia and Madison Walsh. Coal Mine Theatre (1454 Danforth). Opens Tuesday (April 5) and runs to April 24, Tuesday-Sunday 7:30 pm. $35. coalminetheatre.com/tickets/.
If you ask director Peter Pasyk what kind of plays he enjoys working on, he responds immediately: gritty, intimate and morally ambiguous.
All three describe his latest project, Coal Mine Theatres Killer Joe, written by Tracy Letts, best known for the award-winning August: Osage County.
Like that later epic drama, Killer Joe focuses on a domestic struggle, here involving a trailer-dwelling Texas family that gives new meaning to the word dysfunctional.
Son Chris finds himself in debt to a drug dealer and has the idea to off his well-insured mother, now separated from the family, with the help of the title character, a cop as well as a hired killer. Chris also enlists the aid of his family: father, sister and stepmother.
This is a script that my designer, Patrick Lavender, and I have wanted to mount for a decade, says Pasyk. We had developed a full palette of ideas for the production, and when we talked about it with Coal Mine, we realized that the storefront theatre provided the perfect long, narrow space, allowing the audience to be close to the intense action.
Its a piece that challenges our sense of morality when I read it, my own moral compass, a sense of what the world should be, was confused.
He stresses that while the characters do some pretty awful things, they dont lose their basic humanity.
The trap of staging this play is to identify and play the people as stereotypes. In fact, though Letts uses the conventions of noir crime stories like Pulp Fiction, his development of strong relationships makes this a character-driven story.
Killer Joe, for instance, is both a hit-man and a policeman. He has the strongest set of principles in the play. Letts not written him as the bad guy but rather takes the pulp genre elements and subverts them, playing against our expectations.
Pasyk sees the search for home as one of the plays central themes, the trailer itself only a way-station, a middle place.
Still, that trailer, designed by Lavender, has been key to the production from the start.
Because we wanted this world to feel integrated, we began well in advance by building the set in the Coal Mine before rehearsals began. We did all our work in it, so the actors could make it their own.
The past year Pasyk, artistic director of surface/underground, has shifted back and forth between the big summer festivals and local indie companies. He was assistant director at the Shaw Festival in 2015 before returning to Toronto to direct the excellent Late Company and helm Killer Joe. Later this week he goes to Stratford to assist on Graham Abbeys Breath Of Kings: Redemption.
That Stratford show is based on British history, but its no more real that Killer Joe, which Letts said was partly inspired by a newspaper article about a murderous Florida family. However fantastical you might find the Killer Joe plot, the truth is that life is always stranger than fiction.
