After the excellent film Monster, it's hard to believe anyone could find anything fresh to say about serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Yet in this Chicago premiere of Carson Kreitzer's play based on the Wuornos trial, everything old is new again. A routine police procedural becomes an investigation of power relations between men and women; a prostitute-turned-killer becomes an embodiment of feminist theory; and the audience's assumptions about who is entitled to take whose life for what purpose are completely up-ended. Self-Defense is exceptionally timely as the nation re-examines its view of the death penalty--particularly with a death-penality proponent in the White House.
Tara Mallen, Rivendell's producing artistic director makes a superb Wuornos (here called Jolene): unapologetic, furious instead of frightened, already acquainted with the worst life could possibly offer. Jo's internal contradictions show at every turn in Mallen's performance. We believe in the reality of a prostitute who's embarrassed by having to give a graphic description of her own rape. Mallen portrays a woman so isolated that "self-defense" is a way of life rather than an occasional event, who nonetheless searches constantly for love, even confessing to murder once she's persuaded it will benefit her beloved. In Jo's world, where any sex partner may turn violent, where crimes against people like her are never investigated, where cops threaten prostitute witnesses with vice arrests unless they provide free blow jobs, her "insanity," manifested by killing seven of her customers, seems sane, even just.
Director Edward Sobel creates an atmosphere from which there is no escape for the audience, just as there's no escape for Jolene. He seats the audience around the action in isolated little pockets of a few seats each, and presents the action with no intermission and barely any pause between scenes. Half a dozen playing areas are picked out by lighting: the courtroom, Jolene's hotel room, the police station, the morgue. (Jaymi Lee Smith's lighting design enhances the tension, as the lights seem to erupt from nowhere. She also makes sparing but effective use of a red police light set in the middle of the floor.) Sobel and his ensemble move us from the late stages of the investigation into the serial killing of middle-class white men through Jo's capture, imprisonment, trial, movie deal and execution, with a relentless inevitability that suggests the Stations of the Cross. At first there's a bit of confusion about what the crime is: several prostitutes describe the same customer, someone who pays with TV sets and VCRs, but is he the subject of the investigation or its object? Then you realize that the confusion is deliberate. Yes, this is a description of Jo's final victim, but he could just as easily be the perpetrator of an equally long string of murders of prostitutes. Those women's deaths are considered so trivial that they're catalogued under the chilling acronym NHI, or "No Humans Involved."
Rather than make Jo's killing of johns into a feminist statement, Kreitzer lets the events speak for themselves. The horror of the rape that led to Jo's first murder, coupled with the casual indifference of the police to the danger prostitutes face daily, make the killings seem like a triumph for all womankind, but the condescending feminist scholar who volunteers to testify that Jo is insane undercuts any facile "Sisterhood is Powerful" interpretation.
It's hard to say enough about Mallon's outstanding performance, which is both tough and endearing, sickening and understandable. She gets excellent support from the seven actors who play all the remaining roles--from the women, especially, who transform themselves from lap-dancers to coroners, reporters and lawyers, and back again. Those transformations echo the point of the play: that who we are and what we do depends on circumstance, role, even costume far more than we'd like to admit.
The play has some weaknesses, beginning with its alternate title: Death of Some Salesman makes the piece sound like a parody instead of the deadly serious work it is. Nothing is made of Jo's mentioning that her regular customers are off serving in the Gulf War, so the references are gratuitous; comparing war to a string of murders is too glib for a work as otherwise nuanced as this one. Likewise, though I enjoy the critique of evangelical Christians implicit in their eagerness to send Jo home to God, I'm not sure what relevance their hypocrisy and headline-grabbing has to the play's central questions of life and death. Of far more power is the understated conversation between a conscience-stricken investigator and his boss. The investigator wonders why the deaths of prostitutes are not getting attention, and the boss responds that the state of Florida is not concerned that prostitutes will stop coming to work in Florida; they're concerned that businessmen will stop coming to work in Florida. It's a brief, chilling, and scarily persusasive economic argument for the priorities set by law enforcement.
This powerful, unsparing work deserves attention. It recalls for me one of the earliest reviews of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: "Plays fall into two categories, the quick and the dead. Virginia Woolf is, terrifyingly, among the quick."
So is Self-Defense.