Review: Out of Box Theatre’s ‘The Pillowman’ is a wild ride into the dark

Plays that have disturbing subjects are often accompanied by a brief alert in the program such as, “Warning: This play touches on themes of family violence,” or something like that.

A similar warning for Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman  is certainly warranted, but it could hardly be brief. Warning: This play touches on themes of family violence, torture, interrogation, child abuse, child torture, child murder, child mutilation, adult suicide, child suicide, kidnapping, fratricide, patricide, matricide and execution. And there’s gunfire.

So maybe best to keep it brief: The Pillowman isn’t for everyone.

But Out of Box Theatre has found the right theatrical conditions for Martin McDonagh’s famously disturbing play: Put a handful of excellent actors in a tiny room, strip away everything unnecessary and let the stories and the audience’s imagination do the work.

The production takes place in Out of Box’s new 40-seat Creator’s Den, a black box space so small it feels more like a classroom than a conventional theater. The audience sits around the playing area, essentially inside the action, making the play’s central framing device — an interrogation room in a fictional but uncomfortably familiar totalitarian state — especially effective.

I’d seen The Pillowman before in a more traditional setting, but I found the intimacy here much more effective and gripping. Here, the main character, writer Katurian (Dani Herd), enters abruptly at the play’s opening, blindfolded and through the same door the audience used to enter. There’s something immediately disorienting about it. Within seconds, you feel like you’re in the interrogation room yourself.

Playwright McDonagh, best known to many audiences as the writer and director of In Bruges, premiered The Pillowman at London’s National Theatre in 2003. It reached Broadway in 2005 with Billy Crudup as Katurian and Jeff Goldblum as Tupolski. The play has had several notable revivals since, including a 2023 West End production starring singer Lily Allen as Katurian.

The story is somewhat complicated: Katurian is being interrogated about the similarity between his gruesome fictional stories and a series of child murders by two detectives, Tupolski and Ariel, while his brother Michal is held in another room.

The interrogation is tense on its own, but Katurian’s stories punctuate that intensity. There is something almost instinctive about hearing someone begin a story with “Once upon a time.” Even when what follows is horrifying, you lean in.

Zip Rampy’s direction wisely lets that storytelling breathe. There are few props, few theatrical tricks and no apparent desire to impress us with directorial cleverness. The writing and the actors carry the production.

Herd moves convincingly among Katurian’s fear, defiance, confusion and resignation. Ben Barlow gives Michal a childlike quality that makes him both sympathetic and uncomfortable to watch, while also providing some genuine humor and humanity. Emily Marie Lester’s Ariel is sinister and threatening but gradually becomes more complicated as we understand what drives her. Nicholas Tycho Reed as Tupolski was particularly strong in the way he inhabits the character moment by moment. It would be easy to make both detectives into monsters. Instead, the script ultimately reveals them as interesting, complicated people.

The tonal shifts are part of the ride. This is disturbing material, but there are a few laughs along the way. The production runs close to three hours with two intermissions, yet I was hooked throughout. By the end, I was a little tired and dazed but never bored. (I thought I spotted a couple on a first date to which I can only say: If they both enjoyed the show, it’s probably a match.)

I did have one quibble. One of Katurian’s stories is accompanied by illustrations on a flat-screen TV. The stick-figure drawings added very little and, for me, actually weakened the scene. In a production whose greatest strength is its intimacy and reliance on the audience’s imagination, the screen felt unnecessary and distracting.

What I’m still trying to figure out is what  puzzled me about The Pillowman when I first saw it years ago: What does McDonagh ultimately want to say? The mechanics of the story are clear enough; the pace and the writing are wildly effective and gripping. The ending brings things satisfyingly full circle. But I was left wondering what McDonagh is ultimately telling us about storytelling and suffering.

Maybe uncertainty is part of the point. Or maybe I’m still waiting for the story to finish. Either way, I was completely caught up in the telling.

Where and When 

Out of Box Theatre’s The Pillowman runs through October 4 at the Creator’s Den. Tickets, $25. 
585 Cobb Parkway S., Ste. G-1

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Andrew Alexander is an Atlanta-based writer, editor and arts journalist. A longtime contributor and former senior editor at ArtsATL, his work appears regularly in local, regional and national publications, covering theater, visual art, music, film, dance, literature and the artists and institutions shaping Atlanta’s cultural landscape.