During a single four-week period in the spring of 1991, four prostitutes vanished from the typically safe streets of Vienna. After the bodies of two of them turned up in nearby woods, naked, face down, and strangled with their own underwear, people in the Austrian capital, where prostitution is legal, began to fear it was harboring a serial killer.
He immediately began doing book signings and guest spots on television talk shows (dressed in a signature white suit accented with a bright red rose or scarf) as well as working as a freelance print and broadcast journalist. And he traveled: in September 1990, less than four months after his release, he tooled up to Prague in his BMW for an author’s appearance; a month later he went to the Austrian city of Graz; that December he visited the border town of Bregenz, then made another trip to Graz. Then, in the summer of 1991, he spent a month in Los Angeles, reporting on prostitution, homelessness, and crime there for an Austrian magazine.
This weekend, on the stage of Symphony Center, Jack Unterweger will rise again, channeled by the estimable John Malkovich in The Infernal Comedy, a theater piece for actor, two sopranos, and a baroque orchestra. Originally suggested by costume designer Birgit Hutter, who introduced Malkovich to Musica Angelica Baroque director Martin Haselböck, the piece is directed by its author, Michael Sturminger. It combines music by the likes of Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven with a monologue in which Unterweger returns from the dead to finally tell the truth—or something like it. It had an informal first production in Santa Monica in 2008 under the title Seduction and Despair; fine-tuned since then, it’s had more than 80 international performances.
Fri 2/1-Sat 2/2, 8 PM, Chicago Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, 312-294-3000, cso.org, $35-$125.
