Back in 1990 Tracy Letts invited friends to the first public reading of his Texas trailer-trash black comedy Killer Joe. The response, he told me for a 2007 Chicago magazine story, “was outrage.” Three years later, when the play finally received its world premiere at Next Theatre after having been rejected all over town, the Reader‘s own Jack Helbig launched a critical jihad against it, likening it to “slasher films and hard-core pornography” and declaring, “Some may argue that these disturbing scenes are part of the play’s dark worldview, and I would agree that they are. But when an artist’s vision is so contemptible, barbaric, and flat-out evil, the fact that’s he’s consistent is no virtue.” (This led to Letts calling Helbig, a little puzzlingly, “a horse’s cock.”)
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The show was a hit anyway, and so were subsequent productions in New York and Edinburgh. Reaching London just in time for the neo-Jacobean excesses of in-yer-face playwrights like Martin McDonagh and Sarah Kane, Killer Joe became, as critic Aleks Sierz put it, one of the British scene’s “landmark plays of the mid-1990s.”
Still, the Smiths are mighty dumb, and too much depends on their insistent dimness. For all its intimations of great things to come, Killer Joe remains a very rough beast, a canny first effort, full of gratuitous gestures—chief among them that drumstick scene, which comes out of nowhere and ultimately means nothing except that Killer Joe Cooper is one nasty hombre. I wonder how Letts would handle the same set of circumstances now.
