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Harrower sets Kill the Old Torture Their Young in his native Scotland, but Kathryn Walsh’s production moves the action to America—and since a copy of Time Out Chicago shows up onstage, you can guess where in America we’re supposed to be. The city is presented as a prominent character: hometown boy Robert Malloch, now a successful documentary filmmaker, wants to anatomize it in his next opus. But Walsh’s decision to change the setting only underscores Harrower’s essential vagueness. Neither the place nor the characters are specific enough to register as anything but metaphors, so it really doesn’t matter exactly where or who they are. In fact, the first person we meet is a guy known only as the Rock Singer; he kicks off the play with a self-conscious monologue in which he refers to himself in the third person and muses on whether airplanes stay aloft through physics or the combined will of the passengers and crew.
We briefly meet random capitalized characters like the Woman in Robes, who fulfills the Mysterious Oracle function, and the exasperated Birdwatcher, who only wants to be left alone (and given how depressed most of the other characters are, who can blame him?). A sweet, baffled secretary named Heather falls for the tortured, priggish filmmaker, and there’s a cutesy relationship between a young, angelic woman—actually named Angela—and the cranky old man who lives upstairs from her. Almost all of these people’s paths cross in increasingly unbelievable ways that never really raise the dramatic stakes. Harrower isn’t interested in portraying their lives—he wants to pontificate about how empty their lives are.
