Chicago Embraces The Pillowman

Gamboa was part of an early table reading of The Pillowman in 2015 and was struck by the play’s critique of ​“family, the state, culture and systems of governance.” Although the 2003 script by British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is now award-winning with a Broadway run under its belt, Gamboa still approached the text with a lens that has propelled the play into contemporary times. ​“It’s a play that is produced frequently in these kinds of liberal, bourgeois theaters and Western universities,” Gamboa says. ​“One thing I wanted to do was take that play and show the realities upon which those spaces are built.”

In September 2023, Gamboa assembled some of his closest collaborators for a reading at his home. There was agreement that, although the play is darkly funny, the challenging part of the material is its focus on violence against children, which felt alienating. A resounding sentiment of ​“Who needs to see this?” percolated from those in attendance. A few weeks later, that October, in the immediate wake of the Israeli military’s campaign of genocide of Palestinians, Gamboa recalls: ​“We were bombarded with images of violence against children. We were immediately seeing media propaganda, censorship, repression of protests — so much so that it seemed like we were in the setting of a totalitarian state,” much like The Pillowman.

“I don’t want to operate like these theater companies that try to make invulnerable theater that need to plan out their seasons two years ahead, that need these elaborate workshopping and rehearsal processes,” Gamboa says. ​“Because, then, you never get to respond to the moment, and this is happening right now.” He draws connections between the abundance of videos of ​“Palestinians being slaughtered, while we were [also witnessing] video after video of Black men, women and children being murdered by the police.” So Gamboa committed to producing the work in a Chicago context with Chicagoans.

Founded in 2022, Concrete Content has earned a cult following for its radical aesthetic, raging against the status quo and centering societal critique. Its immersive theatrical experiences sold out nearly every performance of past productions of The Wizards, Ruth on the Rocks and, soon, The Pillowman. Housed in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, Concrete Content believes that ​“producing theater is an act of revolutionary placemaking,” that intentionally pairing a play with a neighborhood venue can drive awareness of critical cultural hubs usually overlooked by the larger arts circuit.

Helping to hold that space is textile artist Carina Yepez, who started working at a fabric store when she was 17 after learning the practice of sewing from her mother, who was taught by her grandmother. Gamboa approached Yepez with a scenic vision that involved quilted curtains, and she was excited to take on her first foray into design for theater. Bringing Concrete Content’s quasi-converted AfriCaribe Cultural Center blackbox to life was a creative challenge as the intimate space features graffitied pillars, haunting curtains and seating alley-style, offering audience members not only a clear view across the investigation room but of one another.

In preparation for The Pillowman, Yepez and Gamboa ​“talked about collecting garments, collecting bedsheets and thinking about the care and playfulness that goes into childhood moments.” In sitting with the dark realities of the play, Yepez explored the binaries of ​“reassembling and destruction and connecting once again” in her quilted curtains. They hang, draped like splattered gauze, aged and tattered from use. Leaning further into the unexpected, the production uses disconcerting soundscapes weaved through, sometimes paired with projected paper puppetry (thanks to the help of artists Agnotti Cowie, Rocio ​“Chio” Cabrera and Jordan Paine).

Assistant director and sound designer Sol Cabrini De La Ciudad contributes much in the way of those edge-of-your-seat anxieties. Also a long-time collaborator to many on the team, Cabrini De La Ciudad’s local roots aid in filtering sound through a Chicago recognizable by ​“different rhythms, whether it’s footwork in music or orchestral sounds, and recordings taken on [her] phone.” She tracks the themes of the play as centering ​“the failure of the state and the failure of the family,” working to align her designs with those tensions.

Cabrini De La Ciudad affirms: ​“This production is also showing the ways in which — even when police are pleading for their [own] humanity — by dehumanizing another individual, that pleading ultimately does not restore their humanity.” Over the course of the play, as we sit stuck in the investigation room alongside the brothers, we witness police commit to ​“just doing their job” while spilling their own vulnerabilities.

This year marks the 10^th anniversary of Chicago’s Reparations Ordinance, which provided financial compensation to police torture survivors, and this production of The Pillowman is informed and motivated by Chicago’s egregious history of anti-Black police brutality. In a sense, The Pillowman gave lead actor Ferrell a way to express how his writing and art are impacted by his day-to-day experiences as a Black Chicagoan and father. The Inglewood-native found theater through performing in spoken word and joining a youth summer program at 14, where he met Gamboa and credits him as someone who ​“challenged my social insight and critical thought.” More than a decade later, these creatives are bonded by real life and the script.

Speaking on his identity as a father, Ferrell expresses that playing a character that allegedly inspires the murder of children was especially challenging as ​“the very real possibilities” of what could happen to his own child became front and center. What drew Ferrell to this play, however, was its ability to ​“get people to really question what way our society is going, and how we’re allowing our art to influence the course of our society, and how that art influences our children too.” The writer character, Katurian, wrestles with the horrifying impact of his work while never wavering in his attachment to the legacy of his writing as a practice.

The Pillowman aches, as echoes of our reality are further amplified through text that is almost too much to bear. But the power is in witnessing the art and further questioning what can be done to mitigate a collapsing society, helmed by power that aims to destroy.