THEATER REVIEW : 2 S.D. Plays Not Timid About Life’s Dark Side

Killers seem to be leaping off newspaper headlines and diving right into the inkwell of modern playwrights these days.

“Down the Road,” Lee Blessing’s new play about a serial killer thirsting for celebrity, closed recently at the La Jolla Playhouse. But “Edmond,” David Mamet’s dark and troubling one-act story of a killer who finds his first glimpse of tenderness in a prison cell continues Friday and Saturday nights at 8 p.m. at the Marquis Public Theatre, through Oct. 14.

And, if that’s not enough of the dark side of life, there is a late-night production of “Pre-Paradise Sorry Now,” a Sledgehammer Theatre production about two neo-Fascist serial killers playing Friday and Saturday nights at 10:30 p.m., through Sept. 30.

Both the Marquis and the Sledgehammer productions are uncompromising and hold high professional standards--especially commendable for two tiny theaters who recruit talent on the basis of the love of the art, rather than on prestige or a paycheck.

Mamet’s play, for all its nightmarish qualities, is the show that finds moments of human vulnerability in its portrait of a seemingly senseless killer.

Edmond, when the play begins, has it all: a nice home, a good job, a smartly clad wife. But something--we never learn quite what--is eating at him. He leaves his wife, telling her he doesn’t love her, and sets off in search of that ineluctable something that calls to him from dark, seamy streets where pimps and three-card monte players rip off the unprepared.

Andy Wynn delivers a mesmerizing performance as Edmond, a bigoted and angry man so powered by his emotions that he is like a cocked gun itching to be shot.

But, under Ellery J. Brown Guzman’s intense direction, the entire nine-person supporting ensemble, in multiple roles, brings poignantly subtle shadings to Mamet’s vision of hell on earth. Kevin R. Chukes instills a visionary gleam in his disparate roles of preacher and the prison mate who rapes Edmond, only later to become the first person with whom Edmond finds love. Laurie Lehmann-Gray mixes vulnerability with hunger as the peep-show girl who titillates but doesn’t satisfy Edmond, and exhibits a flexible morality as Glenna, a waitress Edmond picks up in a diner and kills.

David Paye lends solidity and a hint of compassion to his three roles as a barfly, pawnshop owner and chaplain. J. Francisco Lopez exudes an aura of threat as the card sharp-policeman. R. James Kresser, as the hotel clerk, carries a chip on his shoulder that swells into wrath as the interrogator.

Completing the cast are Jeanne Stawiarski as the respectable woman on the subway and the whore (Edmond, aptly, can’t tell them apart), Elie Freedman as the fortune-teller and massage parlor manager, Paul Liddell as the bartender/pimp/shill and Karen Bender Lust as Edmond’s wife.

John Blunt’s staging, a subtle and swift shifting of black boxes to represent a bed, a diner, a whorehouse and a bar, reach their elaborate height in the bare prison with no-frills bunk beds and a sawed off toilet. A series of projected slides, showing exteriors of crowded, dirty and dangerous streets, suggest the atmosphere in which such tragedies operate in real life. George Edwards’ commendable lighting complements the work without drawing attention to itself.

Performances at 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, through Oct. 14. At the Marquis Gallery Theater, 3717 India St., San Diego.

Dark as Mamet’s vision is, the very fact that Edmond is capable of tears and love puts him several stages in humanity above the killers in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Pre-Paradise Sorry Now.”

Director Scott Feldsher has taken Fassbinder’s play, based on the real-life story of serial killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and transformed a script without a single stage direction into a driving drama of vignettes. It is pointed forcefully at connections between an authoritarian religious upbringing, violence towards women and gay males, the erotic menace of a snuff scene, identification between sex and death, and the Nazi philosophy that can lead people to justify destroying what they call subhuman forms of life.

There is a repeated theme of two versus one, beginning with the young Ian being whipped by a priest and a nun, continuing with two men raping an office worker and culminating in the team of Brady and Hindley singling out vulnerable individuals to kill together. Just as some couples rejoice in bringing forth new life, in this world of inverse morality these two delight in bringing forth death.

Under Feldsher’s taut direction, the actors seem to burn with the anger that fuels their characters. An excellent ensemble of Martin Katz, Walter Murray, Todd O’Keefe, Melissa Reaves, Paty Sipes and Linda Castro, dressed in stark, black and white costumes by Cynthia Wood, is as kinetically in motion as the harsh and blaring sound design by Bruce McKenzie. McKenzie (also currently performing in “Albanian Softshoe” at the San Diego Rep), brings a sense of twisted torment to the leading role of Ian, and Dorrie Sharee Board seems appropriately big, blonde and devoted as Myra, Ian’s fantasy Valkyrie goddess of a woman. There’s a touch of Lady Macbeth in her performance, as she takes her man’s idea of shedding blood and encourages him to bring it to its natural conclusion.

Robert Brill, the remarkable resident set designer for this company, plunges behind a scrim into the considerable depths of the warehouse where the show takes place to portray the living quarters of Ian and Myra. The ensemble wreaks its havoc on the narrow stage, spilling, at times, out into the audience area. Dave Cannon’s video design is a continual reminder of the all-too-real outside world in which such madness prevails.

This production has already laid itself open to some criticism that it exploits, even as it condemns, the violence and pornography it depicts. That is a judgment that doesn’t seem called for here. Horror for the heart of darkness in this story drips as surely as the blood on the stage.

Performances at 10:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, through Sept. 30. At 420 1st Ave., between Island and the railroad tracks.