THEATRE / NEW STAGES: Texan trailer-park blues

Misogyny or morality? Clare Bayley talks to Tracy Letts about Killer Jo e

A man hollers at the door of a Texas trailer-park at night, a semi-naked woman appears to match his cussing with her own, and the reckless, relentless energy of Killer Joe is inexorably underway. Tracy Letts' contemporary gothic revenge tragedy is a fastidious study of moral and physical dereliction in Middle America, telling of a no-good son who owes $6,000 to the heavies and so persuades his father to hire a killer to bump off his own mother for her life insurance. "Look at it this way. Is she doin' anybody any good?" is the argument that all too quickly convinces his father to conspire against his ex-wife.

Letts, a 29-year-old Steppenwolf actor, got the idea for the play from a newspaper cutting. The production went down a storm at the Edinburgh Festival last year; there's no denying the fascination of amorality so brilliantly depicted. But is this merely a slavish portrayal, even a glorification, of a sick world?

"My approach is so dark that it becomes a warning," Letts explains. "Rather than saying this is the way it is, the play's saying this is the way it might be if you don't watch out." Letts denies, though, charges that he is the harbinger of the death of the American family. The son of two teachers, he still believes the family can be "a healthy and nurturing place", and reserves his anger for his country's materialistic tendencies. "You see it a lot in America - people who become spiritually deprived, who receive no sustenance in the form of spiritual or intellectual input. The TV becomes the governor in the family unit."

Wilson Millam's startlingly robust and detailed production experiments with a constant background noise of TV and radio, which subtly comments on the action and feeds the atmosphere of low-level brutality. Millam, another erstwhile Steppenwolf member, came in on the project at a time when most theatres were rejecting the play on grounds of taste and decency. The scene in which the hired killer seduces the innocent daughter of his intended victim was the last straw for many of them. Millam iron ically dubs it "the psychotic rape of the retarded girl", yet in his production the scene has an unexpected beauty and tenderness.

In Britain, some potentially outraged audiences were put off the scent by the assumption that Tracy Letts was a woman, but in America, where his true gender is known, the accusations of misogyny flew. "I got accosted at parties, and not only by women. But I think if you look at the play you can see what I'm trying to do. Terminology is so screwy at the moment, but I consider myself a feminist or a `womanist'. At the end of the play the question is really about how you take control of your life when you've never been given an opportunity to do that; it's about empowerment."

Although the misogyny and viciousness represented in the play are daunting, as Millam himself admits, it is a question more of misanthropy than misogyny. The play itself has a high moral message: "I'd say it's biblical... in the Old Testament sense."

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