Killer Joe at the Gremlin

Not knowing recently if my Guthrie adventure was coming to an end or just turning a page (or more likely entering a long murky denouement) I had decided to start sampling more of the local theater scene to see what I was missing with my usual obsessive tendency to over focus, drawing the universal from the particular, rather than distilling it from the mass of experience like everyone else (that may make no sense to anyone but me, but hey it's not like anybody's reading this). On my first sample of one of our smaller theater companies, I got everything I asked for and rather more than I bargained for.

Really it's not my first taste of what the rest of the local scene was doing, since Theatre Latte Da had just done such a wonderful production at the Guthrie of Old Wicked Songs and I saw Penumbra's operatic production of Gem of the Ocean here on August Wilson's birthday. So on Thursday when I mentally flipped a coin to decide between Torch Theatre's production of MacBeth at the Garage and Theatre Pro Rata's production of Killer Joe at the Gremlin, I figured it should be interesting either way (and boy was it ever). Ultimately my decision came down to needing to eat first, and when I couldn't find a parking spot on 4th to run into Pizza Luce for a slice or to dash into Koy to ask Kirby how quick he could get me a bank roll and a cuppa green tea, I decided to go to the theater I knew was across the street from a Mickey D's and wouldn't be full enough for anyone to notice my post-Big Mac gas attack. The winner was Killer Joe at the Gremlin.

The Gremlin Theatre is in St. Paul on University near Raymond Ave, home of Key's where they always put onions in my motherf***ing omelette no matter what I order. Seriously, if they would just knock that off and quit telling me "Oh, those are just white tomatoes" I might pop in there again... I've seen it happen to other people too, so I don't know why their kitchen is so fixated on making sure everyone is getting their daily dose of sulfites. At least the guy throwing up in a garbage can six feet from my table was a one-time thing, even if it did last 20 minutes. But don't let his review fool you, if they'd bring back the regular waffles ($3.95 with a second one for $1.00) I would totally hop on the #16 bus and go back.

And now that I've cleared that up, the Gremlin shares its building (and its bathrooms) with the aikido school next door, which meant that when I arrived at this University Ave storefront with empty display windows and a door that just directed me down a creepy hallway to a back room draped with black curtains, I was expecting to find a naked FBI agent sliding around silk sheets and Laura Palmer talking backwards to a dancing dwarf... and where the hell was Annie anyways? Oh dear, I may have wandered off on another tangent. The rough look of the theater was in perfect keeping with the set, which was a garbage strewn trailer in some Texas hell-hole. It looked like a tornado had just hit the theater and deposited all this crap on stage. As I settled into my creaky, threadbare seat (nicked from the ruins of the Loading Dock Theater) I thought these were dire beginings to an evening at... "the Thee-a-tah!"

But I was wrong. Killer Joe is the story of Texas trailer trash who concoct a half-baked scheme to bump off their mother for the insurance and live like minimum-wage kings, and that horrible looking collection of trash was exactly how those people lived, with biting ants on the floor and the constant flicker of NASCAR in the living room. It was a really great show, full of characters I couldn't look away from, sometimes because I was desperate to know what would happen next, and sometimes because they were like a sore I couldn't stop scratching. If Quentin Tarantino nd Robert Rodriguez owned a theater, this is the show they would open with (well, either Killer Joe or Titus Andronicus) because never have I seen anything crammed with so much nudity and raw sexual violence that wasn't direct-to-video. Apparently the playwright Tracy Letts also penned August: Osage County which won him a Tony Award earlier this year, and I hear those aren't easy to come by.

I was looking for something I wouldn't see at the Guthrie, so I was certainly intrigued when the first actor to cross the stage came out completely bottomless. As she and her son-in-law bickered about the appropriateness of her exposed bush in graphic detail, I had to admit Pro Rata had certainly delivered. The honest, uncomfortable nature of that presentation, the imperfect, quivering exposed bodies that sent a tingle up my spine and and the brutal violence that twisted me in my seat was so raw that by intermission I was chatting up the lobby staff about my vast expertise as a theater volunteer and offering my services. And it was only partly because she was cute and had a genuine, guileless quality that said, "I'm groovy-relaxed enough to be delighted by my haiku shirt and to possibly give you a chance" that I was talking to her, and mostly because of the art on display. (And given all the pain, confusion, and growing sense of horror that everyone who dates me seems to experience, I'm going to leave it to the cute of the world to amuse themselves.)

Killer Joe runs at the Gremlin (2400 University Ave in St. Paul) until Oct 19 with tickets on a sliding scale ($14-28), and I encourage anyone looking for a visceral theater experience to give it a try, especially since October movies are so dire (and there's only so many times you can see An American Carol, Captain.

http://www.theatreprorata.org/
Box Office: 612.874.9321