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Killer Joe
“His eyes hurt,” says Dottie, the damaged young girl at the center of Letts’s first play. She’s talking about Joe, the imposing character her brother, dad and stepmother have hired to kill her mom. And she’s right: Darrell W. Cox has found an ideal channel for his natural onstage intensity in the title character of this electric 1991 thriller. Long before he explodes in the horrific (and terrifically staged) violence of the explosive second act, Cox compels quietly. He observes Dottie so intently that it seems it really might hurt to fall under his gaze.
Chris, the smallest of small-time drug dealers, is in deep to a Dallas thug; seeking refuge in the trailer his dim-witted dad, Ansel, shares with his randy second wife, Sharla, Chris proposes a Hail Mary plan to have Ansel’s first wife, Chris and Dottie’s universally despised mother, taken out for her life insurance money. The man for the job is Killer Joe, a full-time cop and part-time contract killer. But while Chris promises to pay Joe out of the insurance returns, Joe only accepts payment up front—though he might take a retainer in the form of Chris’s sister.
To say more would be unfair to those new to Letts’s trailer-park Grand Guignol. Suffice it to say that Snyder’s revival, even more intimate than the play’s 1993 debut at the Next Theatre Lab, is horrifying, exhilarating and exquisitely cast. As great as Cox is in his well-matched role, the play belongs to newcomers Kevin Bigley and Claire Wellin. As the desperate Chris and despondent Dottie, these two exhibit a magnetism that’s, well, killer.
