The Devilish Children and the Civilizing Process

Macabre humor requires a precise touch to succeed: Venture too far into the goofy or campy, and you might as well be Scooby-Doo. Stray too far into the dark, and you risk becoming disturbing or merely tedious, which is where Menekseoglu’s new work finds itself.

The source text is German author Heinrich Hoffmann’s tongue-in-cheek 1845 book of cautionary tales for children, which also served as the inspiration for the 1998 cult theater hit Shockheaded Peter (partially created by Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott, who went on to design The Addams Family musical). Peter went more cheekily gruesome than Hoffmann, providing grisly endings for each of the badly behaved children in its fanciful vignettes.

But Menekseoglu’s hourlong take goes a step too far, framing its tales of rotten kids getting audaciously bloody comeuppances with the shrill screams of a genuinely terrified three-year-old boy (played by adult actress Judith Lesser) who’s dropped off, sporting a black eye, by his uncaring father at a kind of asylum for impolite children. Despite shrewdly comic touches in the performances of Bil Gaines, as a child prisonmate with a subtly sadistic bent, and Anna Menekseoglu, as an off-her-rocker kid with a cat fixation, the foregrounded toddler trauma is made too concrete to laugh past.

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