Laughing matters

As a young boy growing up in a working-class London district, playwright Martin McDonagh was fascinated with the New Testament tale of the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus. At first, he recalls, he identified with the good thief, the one who accepted Christ’s invitation to salvation. But as he grew older, he found a closer empathy for the one who took his chances on hell.

“He was like Johnny Rotten,” says the 35-year-old McDonagh with a glint in his eye, describing his antihero as a punk rocker of biblical times. “The only thing the unlucky [guy] probably did was steal a bag of potatoes.” It’s hardly a surprising evolution for a writer who gained a “bad boy” reputation after the breakout success of his “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” in 1996. He quickly followed with a slew of plays, less famous perhaps but no less sardonic in their depiction of claustrophobic rural Irish life, including “The Lonesome West” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” Born to Irish expatriates, McDonagh left school at 16, went on the dole for 10 years, and by the time he was 27 had four plays running in London.

In his new work “The Pillowman,” however, McDonagh has chosen to plow far different and more disturbing terrain. Its protagonist Katurian -- a butcher by day, aspiring writer by night -- has been detained in an unnamed totalitarian state for his lurid and violent short stories. Among the 400 or so confiscated tales is a variant of the biblical thieves’ story called “The Three Gibbet Crossroads.” But his brutal interrogation by two detectives is largely centered on three other tales -- “The Little Applemen,” “The Tale of the Town on the River” and “The Little Jesus” -- which describe the gratuitous mutilation and murder of children, including the ingestion of razor blades, the chopping off of toes and a crucifixion. They have apparently inspired a killer to turn fantasy into fact.

Oh, and one other thing: The play is a comedy.

After premiering at London’s National Theatre last year, “The Pillowman” transferred to the West End, where it was heaped with raves and honors. The move to Broadway, with the same director, John Crowley, but featuring an American cast -- Billy Crudup as Katurian, Jeff Goldblum and Zeljko Ivanek as the detectives -- has also been met with near-unanimous critical approbation. Last week, the production received six Tony nominations, including nods for Crudup and Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Katurian’s mentally deficient brother. “Pillowman” is considered the underdog in a battle with John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” for the best play Tony.

Critics on both sides of the pond have hailed “The Pillowman” as boldly original, signaling a new maturity in the work of McDonagh. Audiences, at least on Broadway, have responded more ambivalently. “Pillowman,” whose audience skews younger than those of most Broadway plays, has had its share of walkouts. One middle-aged lawyer and her husband left at intermission after she spent the last minutes of the first act with hands over her ears. “I couldn’t bear it, it was so upsetting,” she said, asking to remain anonymous. Theater chat rooms have also been filled with debate. As one poster put it: “I was distracted by what kind of sick mind could have come up with such a play?”

For his part, McDonagh says he can’t understand why more people don’t think that way. “It seems so natural to me,” he says without irony, adding that although he never writes anything just to shock or horrify, he never censors his imagination. “I’m more worried about boring people than offending them.”

Indeed, sitting in a crowded theatrical hangout, the playwright, with his matinee good looks and shy charm, seems light years away from the tipsy upstart who nearly got into a fistfight with Sean Connery during an awards luncheon in London.

Though he acknowledges that he has always been treated fairly in the press, McDonagh stopped giving interviews five years ago and has only recently acceded to requests, largely to support “Pillowman.” “Besides,” says McDonagh, a vegetarian since his early teens, “it’s nice to get loads of free booze and food.”

McDonagh says he’s not averse to sentiment, as long as it’s earned. Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and the holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” are among this film lover’s top 10. He loves Sam Peckinpah’s movies as well, not for their slow-motion violence, he says, but because the director is so good at capturing the “sadness and truth” of men going to meet their doom.

At one point, when the conversation turns to Bruno Bettelheim -- author of “The Uses of Enchantment,” the classic Freudian text on fairy tales -- McDonagh is genuinely moved to hear that the writer, a Holocaust survivor, committed suicide. In Katurian’s story that gives the McDonagh play its title, a creature made of the fluffiest pillows is on a mission: to persuade children who will have desperately unhappy lives to commit suicide to avoid the tragedies that will eventually befall them (an inverse, curiously enough, of “It’s a Wonderful Life”). Asked whether the Pillowman should have visited Bettelheim, McDonagh shudders. “Oh, that’s too creepy,” he says. “That kind of horror, that kind of sadness, is just too specific. I find it much harder to think about that than any kind of make-believe having to do with ‘The Pillowman.’ ”

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‘The power of myth’

Goldblum feels the playwright is too easily dismissed as simply a good storyteller. “Martin is a very sweet, kind and sensitive guy,” he says. “I think this play is very spiritual. It has a lot to say about the power of myth and storytelling. It raises big ideas about the responsibility of the artist in a poetical and masterful way.” McDonagh’s talent for spinning “once upon a time” on its head was developed early on, the result of his Irish-Catholic roots; an avidity for writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Flannery O’Connor; an addiction to rock music, TV and films; and his own fevered imagination.

He and his older brother, John Michael, chose to remain in London when their parents returned to the old family stomping ground in Galway. But the teenagers frequently visited the rural Irish county and its storytelling tradition impressed Martin. He would later skewer its hapless inhabitants in a series of bitterly funny plays, starting with “Beauty Queen.”

During a lonely period in his late teens, he wrote 200 short stories, which he intended to fashion into a film titled “57 Tales of Sex and Violence.” “Only one was actually about sex -- ‘Anarcho-Feminists’ Sex Machines in Outer Space.’ The rest were about violence,” McDonagh recalls. Eight stories eventually made their way into “The Pillowman.”

The tales were generated in a hothouse of anger and alienation. Unemployed, the fledgling writer spent most of his day at the typewriter when he wasn’t watching Australian soap operas (“for the girls in the bikinis”). He also spent a lot of time fighting with his brother, now a screenwriter (“Ned Kelly”), over the most mundane matters; their explosive relationship would be chronicled in 1997 in his Sam Shepard-esque “Lonesome West.”

After listening to BBC radio plays, most of which he considered “crap,” he began submitting his own work to the national network -- only to repeatedly get rejected. McDonagh’s loathing for the BBC in some way parallels Katurian’s prickly relationship to the detectives in “Pillowman.” “I was interested in doing something new, vital and fun,” he says, “and their rejection was that class thing: ‘We know what is good and artistic and you’re not part of it.’ So there’s a lot of anger, I guess, in the stories and in the plays.”

In “Pillowman,” Katurian notes: The first duty, perhaps the only duty, of a storyteller is to tell a story. McDonagh, however, argues that reality is not quite that simple. It is true, he concedes, that in the past he has said that he doesn’t set out to “say anything” in his plays. But he disagreed with a recent essay in the New York Times in which critic Charles Isherwood compared “Pillowman” unfavorably to “Doubt,” noting that the former sought only to entertain while the latter admirably attacked larger political and social issues. “I never really enter into a debate with a critic,” he says later by phone. “But I think [Isherwood] doesn’t understand that things can be entertaining and deep at the same time. Things don’t have to be humorless to be worthy.”

Noting the grim imagery in the play, Crudup says, “Martin works very hard to present the most forceful kind of obstacles to ideas of hope and faith and compassion, but they’re there, just very elusive. Usually, when you have an imaginative thriller adventure story, it comes at the expense of real human interaction. But ‘Pillowman’ also manages to be insightful, sometimes clearly, sometimes opaquely, about how we relate to each other.”

With a laugh, the actor adds, “Martin would probably say all this is bogus. But I don’t really care if he does or not. As a writer, it’s his fault I can come to these outlandish conclusions.”

The moral of a McDonagh story is often cloudy -- though in the parable of “The Little Jesus” in “Pillowman,” he uses a child’s suffering to hammer home, literally, the message that looking out for the poor and disenfranchised can get you killed. But Mel Gibson’s idea of “The Passion” it’s not.

In terms of the larger issues he raises about creativity and the writer’s moral responsibilities, he says, there are no easy answers. “I think it does say that creativity is beautiful and worthwhile for its own sake,” he says, “But in terms of responsibility? I don’t think that Martin Scorsese can be held responsible because John Hinckley saw ‘Taxi Driver’ many times and became obsessed with Jodie Foster. If something happened to a child after a person saw ‘Pillowman,’ I’d definitely feel guilty about it, but I wouldn’t be culpable.

“What I like about the play is that it won’t fit into an easy box. It’s messy and edgy and dark and people are still able to appreciate it and accept it or at least be provoked by it.”

McDonagh intends to give playwriting a break to devote himself more to film scripts he’s developing. (Movies have always been a first love anyway, he says, pointing out with some delight that he was raised just blocks away from where Alfred Hitchcock grew up.) His film debut will most likely be “Suicide on 6th Street,” a Working Title Films project about a man in small-town America who unsuccessfully tries to kill himself. The film is scheduled to begin shooting this fall. He plans to direct his second feature, “In Bruges,” about small-time English gangsters. And he’s just finishing his third screenplay -- “Seven Psychopaths” -- a thriller set in Los Angeles that, like “Pillowman,” is interspersed with many of his early short stories.

In “Pillowman,” Katurian makes a heartfelt plea for his stories to be saved, locked away in a box until 50 years after his death. McDonagh is asked which of his writings he, if faced with the same choice, would want to have safeguarded. “The next one,” he replies. “The next one is always going to be your best one.”