The Pillowman
Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of seeing “The Pillowman”, directed by a graduate student that I know from the Speech and Debate Team. The show itself was, in my opinion, well done considering the small stage and minimal prop use. It’s a fairly simple story: an author and his brother live in a futuristic, totalitarian state and are arrested by the police for the murders of three children. However, the author is innocent of the crime, and doesn’t know that it was his gruesome fictional stories that inspired his mentally challenged brother to murder the children. By the end of the play, the author has murdered his brother to save him from execution and has pleaded guilty to the crimes he did not commit, on the condition that, for a truthful confession, his stories will not be burned. However, the investigators discover that he is innocent after the third child that was supposedly murdered is found alive and unharmed. Since he did not give a truthful confession, he is told that his stories will be burned and is then executed. The play ends on a slightly uplifting note, when it is revealed that one of the investigators felt pity for the author and did not burn the stories, instead leaving them in the file to be released in fifty years.
My only complaint with the show was how predictable it became. By the second half, it was nearly obvious how the story would end: the author is innocent, is killed anyway, but the stories are saved. It made it hard to pay attention and dull, which was a shame considering that it had started on such an interesting note.
