It isn’t simply the reddish-brown wig that makes Karen Slack, a highly respected local actor, unrecognizable as one of the two mothers emotionally sparring in the world premiere of William Cameron’s “Truth Be Told,” directed by Christy Montour-Larson. (It runs at the Curious Theatre Company through Feb. 10.)
Instead, it is the unerring, even frightening, way in which Slack disappears into Kathleen Abedon’s prickly, pained skin. As the play opens, Kathleen and Josepha “Jo” Hunter (Jada Suzanne Dixon), a true-crime journalist with a solid reputation, are about to begin work on what Hunter refers to a little too presumptuously later in the play as “our work.”
A year earlier, Kathleen agreed to share her story with Jo. Kathleen’s son was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound among the 13 people he killed at a warehouse. Forensics and eyewitness testimony of the mass shooting’s survivors hold little doubt that Julian was the perpetrator. The spree began with the murder of his stepfather.
But now that Hunter is ready to get down to business, Kathleen begins asserting a counter theory, one in which Julian was not the killer but another victim. “There was gunfire,” she says, reading from a document she’s written about the events, as if the perpetrator is no longer known.
Unsurprisingly — and not always sympathetically — Jo is riled by this turn of events. In Dixon’s portrayal of Jo, we find a professional who has an investment (literally, a book contract) in landing Kathleen’s story. (So, is that a conflict of interest? When Kathleen points out that it may be, we can’t disagree.)
In a rather hollow attempt to prove her empathy, Jo mentions an uncomfortable event that involved her 5-year-old son. And as their interactions become more adversarial, Kathleen uses that anecdote to force Jo to wrestle with her own feelings of being a mom whose son shames her by doing something inexplicably violent. The events aren’t equivalent, but her argument is uncomfortably effective.
Although “Truth Be Told” is a play for two actors, another character intrudes into the goings-on in the basement-level apartment (aptly designed by Caitlin Aye). A week before Jo’s visit, Kathleen met with Alan Covington. The popular podcaster came to her home bearing the gifts of conspiracy theories and exoneration. (Think of the disgraced Alex Jones.) Someone else killed all those people. What about the guy in the alleyway behind the warehouse? And just because video images of the workers’ lounge show someone wearing Julian’s clothes and carrying his rifle doesn’t mean it was the 17-year-old. Kathleen quotes a mishmash of breaking news accounts to support her newly shored-up sense that “the facts are in dispute.”
Undergirding Kathleen’s story are other factors: economics to be sure; the challenges of affordable child care; the ways schools do and don’t address violence; hints of abuse. Do they add up to mass murder? No, but they offer insights into Kathleen’s denial and shame, to her trying to make sense of an irreducible “why?”
In the playwright’s description of his characters, Cameron notes that Kathleen is “[a] grieving, working-class mother of an alleged mass shooter. Kathleen is angry, contentious, and fighting boldly for her late son’s legacy.” Or against it. Her tenacity in sharing Covington’s “evidence” is impressive and almost touching in its desperation to reconcile a child she deeply loved with the agent of so much rending heartbreak.
There is something in Kathleen’s refusal to acknowledge her son’s guilt that while psychologically understandable frustrates Jo and may infuriate audience members. Such is the burden that Slack so boldly embraces here, making Kathleen both vexing and tragic.
Such, too, is a weight the Curious Theatre Company appears willing to take on. No other local theater company has put as much producing muscle into plays that wrestle with gun violence (“On the Exhale,” “Gloria,” “The Secretary” most recently) as this indie stalwart. Consider it a community service. After all, our purple state has contributed mightily to the nation’s mass shooting statistics.
“Truth Be Told” — and the other works — speak not so much to Aristotle’s notions of catharsis (or “closure,” in media pablum) as to theater’s will to engage, to ask us to feel and to formulate fresh questions without retreating to our corners of certainty. (Gun control offers reasonable “how” solutions to our at times inscrutable “why?” quandaries.)
Playwright Cameron ends his roiling drama on a quietly shattering note. “Hush … hush … hussshhh” are the play’s final words.
IF YOU GO
“Truth Be Told”: Written by William Cameron. Directed by Christy Montour-Larson. Featuring Jada Suzanne Dixon and Karen Slack. At Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma. Through Feb. 10. For tickets: boxoffice@curioustheare.org and 303-623-0524.
