It's a Dark Path "Down the Road" at Two Crows Theatre

We are all fascinated by monsters, both real and imagined. And while it’s easy to see the latest ripped-from-the-headlines horror movie as harmless entertainment, laughing at ourselves as we react to the jump-scares, it’s harder to justify the obsession we have with those who commit real atrocities — true crime media sensations like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gasey, or Ted Bundy.

Or William Reach.

Reach is the incarcerated murderer and psychopath at the center of Lee Blessing’s play Down the Road, onstage at Two Crows Theatre in Spring Green through March 8. Reach, played by Two Crows Artistic Director Robert Doyle, is undeniably fascinating. A bundle of psychosis and contradictions, he is charming and calm one minute, violent and seething the next. As a serial killer with at least 19 victims — all young women — he talks clinically about the process of luring a pretty girl to his car, trapping her inside, killing her “efficiently” so as not to leave clues, and having sex with the body, often before mutilating it. His methods varied but the results did not. Some of the corpses he dumped near a lake. Some he buried. A few have yet to be recovered, if he is to be believed.

And there is the tricky part.

A husband and wife team of writers is assigned to sift through Reach’s often embellished testimony to find out what is real and turn it into a bestselling book. They are energized when they arrive in the featureless, isolated, one-horse town just off the interstate highway, a combination of gas stations and fast food chains nearest to the maximum security prison where Reach is being held. The couple is anxious to take on the their publisher’s assignment to write a juicy tell-all about the latest monster to haunt the dreams of single women and parents across the country. And as an irresistible hook for readers, the book will be in the criminal’s own words. Though Reach can’t profit from its sales, he controls the information collected, the angle of the story, the level of detail. And he decides what’s important for America to know about him, so that perhaps his name will be remembered — whispered alongside the Unabomber, the Zodiac killer, and the Son of Sam.

For Iris (APT Core Company Member Melisa Pereyra) this assignment is business as usual. She’s an experienced journalist with very clear boundaries who knows how to get a horrific story out of her subject without letting the trauma get under her skin. And this time around she won’t have to be away from her husband for months at a time while she organizes her interview notes, because he’s on the job too. Less experienced and certainly more squeamish, Dan (fellow APT actor Jeb Burris) likes working alongside Iris, even if he’s a little out of his depth, as long as they can spend the nights trying for a baby in their kitschy motel room.

Directed with confidence and nuance by APT Core Company Member Jim Ridge, Down the Road presents audiences with a host of dichotomies. The stage is split in half — one side a dated but warm budget motel room, painted in rusty burnt orange and furnished with faux country accents and a quilt made in China. The other half is a cold, gray room at the prison with harsh lighting, and a government-issue table and metal chairs (design also by Doyle). For the writers, the motel is personal, the prison is professional. For Reach, the prison is anonymity and banishment, anywhere else is freedom. On one side people are creating life; on the other side is a man who has extinguished the lives of many.

And the first few scenes proceed like an orderly tennis match, back and forth between these two opposite worlds. One writer interviews the sociopath, the other stays back at the claustrophobic and campy room, making observations into a hand-held tape recorder. And just when audiences feel that they can predict what will happen next, the boundaries between the two worlds start to dissolve.

The second half of the play destroys the conventions that the first half established so precisely. There are dizzying power shifts as the worlds collide. There are violations, doubts, and breakdowns. And there are outside forces at work — pressure from the demanding publisher, the hunger for lurid details by a voracious public, and the tension between reporting what’s being said and probing deeper to separate the truth from more marketable fantasy. While Iris wants to determine the killer’s motive — uncover the “why,” Reach will only allow her to focus on the “how” and his feelings of power that a reading public might want to experience vicariously. There is also a growing suspicion int the writers’ minds that feeding the collective fascination with the grotesque might be compounding the problem; glamorizing the worst among us perhaps encourages new atrocities.

As the manipulative serial killer, Doyle paces himself admirably, letting the cracks show ever so gradually while simultaneously drawing his prey out into the open. Like the character, his performance is all about control, and the moments when his eyes grow wild underneath a mask of calm are as genuinely frightening as the look of satisfaction that crawls across his face when he pits his two interrogators against one another.

As Iris, Pereyra has the furthest to travel on her character arc. Wearing a chic black leather jacket and sturdy, stylish boots, the flirty and confident woman that starts the play slips away a bit more with every scene. Isolated and undermined, both her body and her mind are infiltrated, making her more vulnerable. As Iris’s obsession with a discarded and rusty water heater grows, the actress’s movements and speech become weaker and less assured. While her panic veers towards melodrama late in the play, Pereyra’s journey toward emotional collapse feels real.

Pereyra’s real-life spouse Jeb Burris plays Dan as an easily depressed and discouraged pragmatist. Unsure of his bearings, both in his writing and with his spouse, he searches for anything he can do to force the situation forward, progressing towards its end. His longing to escape, as he listens to recorded sounds of traffic on the nearby highway, is written clearly on the actor’s face. And his inability to succeed in comforting his wife or powerfully confronting a killer hang on Burris’s body like lead weights.

Both Blessing’s script and Ridge’s direction succeed in complicating what seems like an obvious story at the outset. This leaves the characters, along with disquieted viewers, asking important questions about monsters and how they are made.

Post Script

It's a Dark Path "Down the Road" at Two Crows Theatre