What: Killer Joe
Where and when: Basement Theatre, September 11-October 3
Theatre is a bit like travel, according to actor and Basement Theatre co-artistic director Charlie McDermott.
Audiences should be taken out of their daily lives into the world of the characters, whose stories absorb, entertain and provoke, says McDermott who this month stars in and co-produces the darkly humorous Killer
Joe.
This philosophy explains why he and the design team, led by Simon Coleman, are going all out to ensure the setting for Killer Joe is authentic.
They are building the inside of a trailer home to recreate the chaotic and claustrophobic world of the Smith clan, trailer-trash Texans who put the "trash" into the expression.
McDermott and Coleman have scoured online auction sites eBay and Trade Me for 90s memorabilia, right down to posters and KFC buckets. They have ripped from YouTube sounds like lottery draws and football matches broadcast on radio and the cast are working with a voice coach to ensure they hone their Texan accents.
It's being done on the smell of an oily rag but McDermott wants the audience to feel they're in the Smiths' trailer, sipping warm beer from the bottle, feasting on fast food and watching porn on the big TV.
After all, that's how the family spends most of its time when members aren't eking out an existence at minimum wage jobs. There's dad Ansell (Craig Hall), his second wife Sharla (Sara Wiseman) and the kids Dottie (Shortland Street's Beth Allen) and Chris (McDermott) who owes money to local drug dealers who want payment.
No one in the family can possibly earn enough to make good on his debt so Chris proposes killing his estranged mother, Ansell's first wife, and collecting her life insurance money. To the morally bankrupt family, it seems a perfect solution.
They hire a hit man, Killer Joe Cooper (Colin Moy) who is a fulltime cop moonlighting as a hired assassin. Killer Joe wants part payment upfront but the Smiths can't make one so they offer Dottie as collateral. And from there, things quickly get vicious.
"The play doesn't leave the trailer but you feel the forces from outside crowding in on this family," says Hall, currently on screen as clever criminal Nicky in TV's Outrageous Fortune.
"At first I thought Ansell didn't work but there's a scene where he comes home and slaps a handful of coins from his wages down so they're a family just scraping by. They live at a base level where everything is very instinctual."
Director Cameron Rhodes agrees, saying the key to avoiding turning the Smiths into caricatures is to understand what motivates them and how they meet their needs.
"They are entirely emotionally driven," says Rhodes, who describes the roles as wonderful for actors wanting a challenge. "We have a fantastic cast and everyone in the show is playing quite different characters to the ones they might be known for."
The Smiths' reality is far removed from the glossy tourist brochures that showcase a more familiar image of America but the cast say it's a world found in most places - even New Zealand - and which offers a more telling commentary on modern society.
"It's about the despair of poverty," says Wiseman, best known for her role as the elegant Dr Nicky Sommerville in Mercy Peak.
"If you live in a society that values things like money, property and material goods then you don't have a worth in that society. The actions these characters take are driven by the fact that they are poor and uneducated."
Written in the early 1990s by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, Killer Joe falls into a genre of contemporary work known as In-Yer-Face theatre.
The term was coined by British theatre critic and academic Aleks Sierz to describe work which questions moral norms, is antagonistic and shocking in its use of violence, graphic language, nudity and sexual material.
All this is found in Killer Joe but so is an element of dark humour described in promotional material as "black as Texan oil".
Letts' characters are also complex and while they are very definitely flawed, McDermott believes audiences may be able to empathise with them. He says this is a feature sometimes lacking in the genre.
"You end up watching the entire play but you feel no compassion for the characters and leave thinking, 'I don't care' but Killer Joe isn't like that. You genuinely find yourself having moments when you care about each and every one of them."
Wiseman agrees, saying she wouldn't appear in a play with gratuitous violence or sexual scenes.
"I'm not a big fan of violence on the stage or screen but what attracted me to this play is that the characters each go on massive journeys which come as a surprise to them.
"The violence, the language, is in context. It is frequently the only way they can deal with things around them."
Rhodes likens its style to Greek tragedy, saying it is about moral struggle and what happens when you go against the Gods. While Letts explores what motivates the characters, their actions certainly come back to haunt them.
"This play messes with the audiences' minds. The emotional and moral compass swings wildly."
