The Pillowman- a play by Martin McDonagh

The  Tony Award winning Broadway hit, The Pillowman, is set in an unknown  totalitarian state where Katurian – a butcher by day, a writer of  haunting fairy tales by night – faces two interrogators from the local  government. As Katurian soon learns, his stories, in which characters  meet grisly and macabre fates, have inspired a string of copycat crimes.  As the interrogators resort to increasingly absurd and hilariously  unconventional methods to crack the case, Katurian’s stories come to  life, blurring the line between fact and fiction, truth and  storytelling. In The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh celebrates with dark  humor the spellbinding power of narrative, while exploring the dark  corners of the human imagination and the delicate balance between the  freedoms of the individual and the security of the state. “The season’s most exciting and original new play.”- NY TIMES Martin  McDonagh is often compared to celebrated playwrights like John  Millington Synge and David Mamet. McDonagh is famous for writing dark  comedies with the background setting of Ireland, where he spent most of  his summer breaks. His stories are notorious for using intense symbolism  and twisted climaxes. McDonagh was born and brought up in London,  England, by his construction worker father and housekeeper mother. He  has a younger brother who is a known screenwriter, John McDonagh. He  left school when he was 16 to pursue his love for writing by watching  movies and reading books. After a decade of doing so, in 1994, he wrote  his first 7 plays of which many were eventually staged in London, like:  ‘The Cripple of Irishmaan’, ‘The Lieutenant of Irishmore’ ,‘The  Pillowman’, ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’, etc. For many of these plays  he has been accorded with prestigious awards and nominations like Tony  Award, the Laurence Olivier Award, etc. He is not only a playwright of  excellent creative power but also a well established screenplay writer  and director of movies like: ‘Six Shooters’, ‘In Bruges’ and ‘Seven  Psychopaths’. He is known in the world of theater as the one who gave a  new genre to the theater – the ‘in your face’ theater, for his plays and  scripts are often strongly witted and harshly realistic Directed and designed by Scott Renderer Cast- Roger Mitchell, Brian LaVallee, Brad Hurlburt, Thomas Broderick, Sylvia Tardif, Lucas Tardif with animation by Ben Stechschulte WARNING- this play contains violence and profanity