Kid Sister belongs to the same dramatic category as Killer Joe by Tracy Letts—that category being White Trash Parade of Horrors. But where Letts’s play has a cruel wit and some imaginative depravity, Will Kern’s lurid new thriller, now onstage at Profiles Theatre, manages to be both unpleasant and unremarkable.
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Best known as the author of the cult hit Hellcab, which ran for nine years in Chicago starting in 1992, Kern here supplies not a scrap of memorable dialogue, offers only half-assed attempts at black comedy and social comment, and comes across as a little too desperate to shock, trotting out tried, true, and cheap gambits—coarse language, graphic violence, the suggestion of incest—all without making a discernible point. Kid Sister is seedy, it’s grisly, and then it’s over.
Of course violence erupts at the meeting between Cassius and Kendall, and rages pretty steadily until final bows. Bloody deeds trigger bloody deeds—including one involving a giant pair of pruning shears to the neck. These alternate with gratuitous shocks and twists that make Demi look more and more atrocious and Cassius more and more doomed. Despite everything, Demi doggedly holds onto the absurd conviction that she’ll be a star, even gracing us with a tone-deaf rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” and that she and her brother will end up happily together—you know, together together. If all this artless, asinine, sour-tasting stuff is meant to serve any purpose beyond illustrating the importance of impulse control, I don’t know what it is.
