November 1 - 24, 2024

A decade before August: Osage County won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, American playwright Tracy Letts made waves in theater circles with his debut play, Killer Joe at the Next Lab Theater in Chicago in 1993. Acclaimed productions of Lett’s darkly comic West Dallas thriller followed in London and New York. Killer Joe broadened its audience with the 2011 film adaptation starring Matthew McConaughey in the title role, and directed by five-time Academy Award-winner William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist). 

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Diabolical, riveting, and bizarre, Killer Joe, in many ways, is emblematic of the revolutionary shifts in theater and cinema of the nineties – an era marked by storytellers pushing narrative conventions to the fringes with grit, humor, and hyperrealism. Beneath the “trailer pak” facade in Killer Joe is an elegant homage to the colorful characters, cynicism, and crime-plotting of classic film noir. 
 

Director: Chris Mertan