Jobsite Theater conjures Martin McDonagh’s ‘The Pillowman’

What goes around, comes around.

In the case of Jobsite Theater, Martin McDonagh’s dark, visceral play The Pillowman was first produced way back in 2006 and made such an impact that the company’s longtime fans, subscribers and people who only heard about it are still talking about what a wild, creepy and theatrically satisfying ride it was.

In an unspecified totalitarian state, in a dystopian future, a fiction writer is being interrogated by two detectives, and they’re playing bad cop, bad cop. This isn’t Jerry Orbach and Jesse L. Martin.

Jobsite’s re-mount of The Pillowman opens Wednesday and will run through April 6 at the Straz Center’s Shimberg Playhouse.

Actors Steven Sean Garland and Paul Potenza return from the show’s first incarnation. In that version they played, respectively, siblings Katurian and Michel, the writer and a slow-witted suspect in a grisly series of local child murders.

The 2025 production features Georgia Mallory Guy and Troy Padraic Brooks as Katurian and Michel. And this time, Garland and Potenza are Ariel and Tupolski, the sadistic interrogators.

Both insist that The Pillowman, despite – or maybe because of – its nightmarish quality, is a comedy. Albeit a very, very black comedy of the sort famously dreamed up by McDonagh, the Irish playwright who created The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lonesome West, A Skull in Connemara and the films Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, In Brujes and The Banshees of Inisherin.

“I think (the play) speaks to McDonagh and his voice as a writer,” Garland said. “It’s very bleak and dark, and being Irish myself, that’s sort of the Irish way. To joke through tragedy. And there are plenty of moments in the script that sort of alleviate the tension. You can decide to lean into the comedy, or you can not.

“If you approach the comedy aspect as it being very, very mordant – and bleakly, blackly comic – it’s there. To be honest, I think it’s a very uniquely Irish thing.”

Back in the day – he calls the 2006 production “lightning in a bottle” – Garland could relate to the somewhat hapless artist Katurian and felt at home in the role.

When artistic director David M. Jenkins offered him the role of Ariel, the particularly hard-ass cop, Garland had to think about it. “I re-read it, and I thought, it’s just the darker side of me, to be sure,” he said. “Which we all have.

“And actually Ariel, who I always thought of as the bulldog he’s described to be, has a fascinating character arc. So I really appreciated the fact that I wasn’t just playing a hammer hitting a nail. That there was more breadth to that character.”

Although the subject matter is deadly serious, Potenza said that sitting on the other side of the interrogation table is making him “study it from a completely different angle.

“And it’s brutal. It’s ferocious. But there’s things that come along, the comedy out of some of the banter. And some of the methods that they use to interrogate. And also antagonize each other. So there’s a lot of funny, and the funny comes from the characterizations.

“Tupolski is a smarmy, smart, egotistical interrogating officer. And he uses methods that will disconcert and destabilize. He will says things that are just asinine nonsense, to make his point and to get an answer.”

After several years as one of Jobsite’s go-to actors, Garland has spent the last decade focusing on film and TV work (his most recent appearance on a local stage was Marjorie Prime, at American Stage, in 2018).

Potenza, however, has kept a high profile with the company, appearing in recent productions of Dracula, Frankenstein and Shockheaded Peter. He directed Misery and McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

 “The good thing for Jobsite it that we’ve groomed our audiences; they know about what we do with Martin McDonagh,” Potenza said. “So they have this idea what he’s about. Now that he’s such a big deal in the movies, even more people know about him. So there’s people coming out to see McDonagh’s work.”

Both actors admit that all this table-turning produces a disconcerting feeling. “Here we are again, the two of us still listening to this play, but these characters are so very different for us,” Potenza said. “It goes at a crazy, crazy fast velocity.

“Doing this part, as opposed to what’s supposed to be a sympathetic character, it’s a different night’s sleep for me, man.”

For all information, showtimes and tickets, visit the Jobsite website here.