A boy, his right toes being severed.

A brother, locked in a torture

room for seven years. A small girl crumpling to the ground, her
shinbones shattering under her from the weight of the crucifix she
carries.

Martin McDonaghs The Pillowman, at KCACTF 2015, was a

student-produced dark wonder from Diablo Valley College that
explored a horrifically violent plot with grace.

This play details the story of a writer named Katurian Katurian,

who lives in an unnamed totalitarian dictatorship that seems to exist in
either the past or the future. As the action begins, the police have
imprisoned him for an unknown reason. Eventually he realizes they
think he has been acting out his short stories, which are about the
murders of children. Torture and execution looming, the future looks
bleak and grisly for Katurian.

While this plot is intense, the production had a slow, deliberate

growth into the climax. Dropped into the interrogation room at the
plays start, audience on three sides, we were met with a single light
dangling over Katurians head. He sat silent on a stool, blindfolded,
atop a bleak floor diagonally tiled in blues and whites scrubbed over
dark gray.

In the script, there are only four characters: Katurian, his brother
Michal, the bad cop, Ariel, and the good cop, Tupolski. In this rendition,
a shadow-ensemble of seven actors was added to play out all of the
stories Katurian told. This choice by director Maiya Corral supported
her somewhat surreal method of storytelling.

The most beautiful part of this show was the way Katurians
stories were staged. All that was given by the text was a scene-long
monologue of each story, but in Corrals production, Tyler Iiams, as
Katurian, wove in and out of his tales while the shadow-ensemble
brought them to life.

There was a stylistic contrast between the scenes that happened

in real life, and those that happened in a fictional world. The real
scenes were staged in a heightened, but realistic style: they stayed in
the bounds of the stage and maintained the fourth wall.

The fictional scenes disregarded reality, making untraditional

conventions seem the norm. Here, characters frequented the aisles
and stairs amongst the audience, casting individual people in their
stories. In these scenes, the shadow-ensemble really shone: making

the scene transitions in character, reacting to the main plot being

played out, and performing their gruesome vignettes.

The use of sound in this play was thrilling. Members of the

shadow-ensemble made all the effects with various visually striking
objects. An extremely effective sound occurred during a story about a
little girl forced by her foster parents to walk barefoot on broken glass.
This scraping, crunching noise was accomplished by a curved knife,
made of stone, being thrust repeatedly into a glass vase of pebbles.

The actors were uniformly passionate and adept in their roles

save for one character who didnt seem to fit the world. Tupolski,
played by Andrew Jamshidi, seemed the odd man out. Supposedly the
good cop, he tended to bark at Katurian and get stuck in aggressive
tactics, never trying something from the kinder end of the spectrum.

Overall, this rendition of this black play was an impressive feat

from a company of talented students, giving its audience an entrancing
look into the sick dread of nightmares.