Killer Joe: Depravity with great invention and enthusiasm

(Springfield, MO) Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tracy Lett’s (August: Osage County) first play, Killer Joe comes to the Springfield Contemporary Theatre stage April 22. The play is a Southern American gothic crime thriller set in a West Dallas trailer park.

Chris, an unsuccessful young drug dealer, is desperate to repay loan sharks to whom he is indebted. Chris ropes his father into a plot to hire a contract killer to knock off his mother in order to get the sizable insurance payout.

However, things go disastrously awry as Killer Joe demands Chris’ younger sister Dottie as his ‘retainer’ until the payment for his services comes through. “What follows is like a modern-day, twisted fairy tale, as Joe becomes the prince to Dottie's Cinderella,” says David Weiner, reviewing the Matthew McConaughey film by the same name.

"Killer Joe revels in its white trash stereotypes, and gives you permission to do the same; it's pulp fiction which has it both ways, deriving humor from dirty realism. It's slick, it's well constructed, it knows exactly where it's going." (New York Daily News) 

Tracy Letts wrote the play. Melanie Dreyer-Lude directs the Springfield Contemporary Theatre production. Tim Treanor in a review of Killer Joe for DCTheatreScene.com, said, “There are some that say that Killer Joe is a critique of the forgotten poor during the prosperity of the Reagan years. It is no such thing.

The people Letts trots before us in this show would be failures in any era; highly defective people; America’s Least Wanted. If we gave them caviar they would choke on it; if we placed them in mansions they would set them on fire, burning to death while watching television. Real poor people, on the other hand, are generally folks with great dignity and self-awareness, just like the majority of the rest of us.

“No, Letts despises his characters, and, at his instigation, they engage in depravity after depravity, with great invention and enthusiasm. It is up to the actors to find a recognizable moral center for each of them, and to proceed from that point…so Killer Joe, notwithstanding its bizarre events and tragic conclusions, is a story with human dimensions, engaging and sympathetic.”

This play contains adult language, content and partial nudity.

Performances are April 22–23, 29-30, May 5-7 at 7:30 p.m., and April 24 & May 1 at 2 p.m. Tickets are now on sale online at www.SpringfieldContemporaryTheatre.org, or by phone at (417) 831-8801.

Springfield Contemporary Theatre, a non-profit corporation, presents a wide variety of year round productions. SCT is currently located in downtown Springfield, Missouri, at the corner of Pershing Street and Robberson Avenue at their interim venue SCT’s Center Stage at Wilhoit Plaza.

The Gayly - 4/9/2016 @ 9:49 p.m. CDT