Torture, Vengeance, and Murder? Priceless.

Martin McDonagh, no stranger to the grotesque, gets obscenely familiar with it here. The author of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and other hardscrabble tales has returned to Broadway with “The Pillowman.” His play is like a long fall down a dark well: cold and stomach-turning, yet at times a thrill, in spite of the sinking feeling it produces.At its best, John Crowley’s production is funnier than you’d think material so bleak could be, and bleaker than anything so funny ought to be. In a vaguely Soviet-bloc totalitarian state, a writer named Katurian Katurian (Billy Crudup) is arrested. Children have been meeting grisly ends just as the young characters in his stories do. To crack the case, two interrogators, Tupolski (Jeff Goldblum) and Ariel (Zeljko Ivanek), will use every tool at their disposal. They are particularly enthusiastic about using the torture tool.These scenes reek (in the best sense) of Kafka and Havel, with maybe a dash of Joseph Heller. Consider this exchange between Katurian and the aggressive Tupolski:“I wasn’t trying to be provocative.”“Were you trying to be subservient?”“No.”“Then you were trying to be provocative. And now Ariel is going to hit you again.”A laugh riot, interrogations in police states. Less funny is the part where the cops seem to torture Katurian’s retarded brother Michal (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is locked up in the next room. In time we learn that the boys’ parents were very accomplished sadists, horribly abusing Michal every night as part of some awful experiment to benefit his talented and imaginative brother.Mr. McDonagh’s play bulges with excess, good and bad. By letting us hear Katurian’s stories, several of which are wonderfully bizarre, the playwright shows again the fiendish reach of his imagination. The title story concerns a 9-foot-tall man made entirely of pillows, who saves adult suicides from their misery by convincing them to kill themselves, gently, as children: Heinrich Hoffman, say guten tag to Nietzsche. For two and a half hours, the richness of these stories and the skill used in presenting them hold us captive.Yet Mr. McDonagh doesn’t seem to be in total control of his material. Abusive childhood, a repressive regime, the power of fiction, the value of art, the morality of the creative impulse: All of these are present in “The Pillowman,” but none have a larger resonance. As for the politics, dictatorship seems useful here primarily as a dramatic convenience, so the cops can skip the boring legal bits and go straight from arrest to execution. The play seems to creep toward allegory, but doesn’t get there. Like that plummet down the well, Mr. McDonagh’s play gives you little to cling to, and leaves you no wiser than when you began – though it does make for an awfully entertaining transit.On the stage of the Booth, Mr. Crowley has assembled one of the year’s most fully realized designs. Scott Pask renders the interrogation room in unrelenting gray-on-gray. With its high, bare, industrial-looking walls, the place could double as an abattoir. Brian MacDevitt’s exquisite lighting, with its lyrical shadows and forceful glare, almost seems to be a third interrogator. He and Mr. Pask also find an elegant way to depict the stories that Katurian narrates to the audience.If the play is more convincing in the icky, upsetting bits than the emotionally involving ones, the fault lies in some uneven acting. In the interrogating team, Mr. Ivanek is the uptight bad cop. Head nearly shaved, he is the smallest man onstage, and the most dangerous. When he needs to reveal something of his past, he is open and affecting; when he needs to scare Katurian with the threat of electroshock torture, he is scary as hell. It is fierce, memorable work.Mr. Goldblum plays Tupolski with lanky, thin-lipped menace. All your favorite Goldblum trademarks are here: the laconic smirk, the stuttering tempo, the little bursts of self-regard. (Does any actor let his characters preen better than Mr. Goldblum?) He makes Tupolski every bit as funny as you’d hope, and as supercilious. “You smashed his face in, did you, Ariel?” he says when his partner returns from beating Katurian’s brother. “Except, hang on, that could be classified as police brutality, couldn’t it? Oh no!” But Mr. Goldblum falls flat when Tupolski shares one of his own stories. He can’t seem to decide whether to play it for stakes or for laughs, producing neither.Mr. Crudup – handsome, settled, a genuine talent – is a trickier case a difficulty. Katurian is a man whose brother was tortured, whose parents were sadists (until he killed them), who now writes stories of the most diabolical horror. Not to discount the actor’s ability to disappear into his roles, but how bad could Katurian’s life have been, if he grew up to be Billy Crudup? His performance isn’t wrong, just not quite complete. When Katurian grows determined to save his stories, Mr. Crudup lacks a certain sweaty desperation. It could give the whole final act more weight.Mr. Crudup is at his best – he is, in fact, extraordinary – in the long middle scene with his brother. As Katurian learns the real cause of the children’s deaths, Mr. Crudup cracks, and tries not to be destroyed by what he’s learned. (One vivid gesture also demonstrates what a vital stage presence he possesses. When he prepares to tell Michal a story, Mr. Crudup strikes a pose, extending his arm towards his brother’s face, as if holding an invisible orb for his inspection. It puts every eye in the room on him.)As Michal, Mr. Stuhlbarg is sensational. He makes Katurian’s brother a jittery ghoul, a well-meaning Satan in a sweater vest. With childish gestures and a high, sing-songy voice, he conveys Michal’s simplemindedness, but that’s easy – relatively easy, anyway. Far more impressive is how suddenly Mr. Stuhlbarg shifts from amiable goofiness to frightening rage. One moment funny, the next horrifying: That’s the rhythm of Mr. McDonagh’s play when it’s really working. Nobody helps it do so more deftly than this gifted actor.(222 W. 45th Street, 212-239-6200)

Torture, Vengeance, and Murder? Priceless.

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