If you didn’t get enough bang for your buck New Year’s Eve, tootle on down to the Cigar Factory on East Bay to make you start counting your blessings.

After viewing PURE Theatre’s first production of 2007, “The Pillowman,” you’ll think nothing else could be quite so grim, so violent, so brutish, though certainly not short. Martin McDonagh’s two-act piece — running at three hours total — won all sorts of awards on Broadway a couple of years back, but while brilliantly directed and acted here, a walk in the park it isn’t.

It involves a writer in a totalitarian dictatorship who is interrogated, intimidated, tortured — yes, right there on stage, although this is handled with exquisite discretion — whose stories too closely resemble crimes against children in the neighborhood.

Of course, there is symbolism all over the place, and even the two cardboard cutout policemen could conceivable be voices in the writer’s head, his own conscience, or literary critics. I think not, but in this drama with humor, nothing is certain. Can we really be talking about suffocating family members? Offing little kids?

Director Peter Karapetkov brings a chilling authenticity to this provocative play, with the actors attaining a level of excellence almost never seen from every single cast member. Rodney Lee Rogers suffers, oh, how he suffers (and has only one story published). R.W. Smith, the “good cop” threatens with words and a book of matches. Matt Bivins plays the bad cop with consummate bravado and vulnerability, while Nat Jones’ portrait of the retarded brother shimmers with veracity. Kudos to the young and clearly brilliant Sullivan Graci-Hamilton.

Last Friday PURE Theatre opened their third play by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (the other two being Lonesome West and The Beauty Queen of Leenane) to the same mixed audience response the play, The Pillowman, has received recently in London, New York, and Chicago: one playgoer said it was the best PURE show she's seen; another walked out before intermission.

McDonagh is renowned for the dark humor and casual violence in the three trilogies of plays that preceded The Pillowman. Here, though, there's less humor and more darkness. Pillowman is not horribly gory; in fact, there is very little visible violence. In true thriller style, the brutality here is mostly anticipated and imagined.

A writer named Katurian, author of one published short story and hundreds of unpublished ones, is being held in an interrogation room while his brother Michal is being questioned in another room. The matter at hand is a series of local child murders, committed in ways that bear a striking resemblance to murders described in Katurian's stories. Those stories are peppered throughout the play, along with other sidetracks into other stories.

McDonagh leaves his grotesquely comfortable Irish settings and moves this play into an unnamed "totalitarian dictatorship," one that's more vague and surreal than definitively indicative of an actual geographical place. The detective duo in this interrogation is comprised of self-identifying "good cop" Tupolski (R.W. Smith) and his prickly, explosive subordinate Ariel (Matt Bivins).

Tupolski is actually the more surprising character. With Ariel, you know to expect the unexpected. When Tupolski throws in a new twist, it's more unsettling. Smith gives Tupolski a controlled relaxation; strangely enough, you kind of want to see him snap. Smith delves into Tupolski as storyteller and master of his own little show, and it plays nicely.

Bivins, though, isn't consistent enough in his portrayal to leave a great impression of his work. Ariel has a history, and he has dreams. When Bivins is locked into those particular moments, it's beautiful and sublime; he gets it. But the moments in which he loses the character, he really loses it, and you can see the intensity leave his eyes.

As the brothers, Rodney Lee Rogers and Nat Jones show the loyal bonds that trauma and family forge. In their scenes together, their closeness, dependence, knowledge, and priorities all shift beautifully. Rogers plays Katurian solidly — he even commands a scene where he has a paper bag over his head. He gives Katurian a complex mixture of desperation, impertinence, fear, coldness, and protectiveness.

Nat Jones' Michal is a gentle and, surprisingly, consistently likeable man-child. Jones is thoroughly convincing in his simplicity — even when Michal lies, it's straightforward for him. Jones remains sweet, even when Michal's darkness comes through.

Director Peter Karapetkov has done well with McDonagh's material, providing a dose of comedic mood where some directors might choose to overlook that in favor of more "edgy" and dark interpretations. Karapetkov handles the torture scenes pretty capably, considering that there's no distance between audience and stage at PURE to work with for illusion's sake. So when Ariel beats up Katurian behind a desk, the method is understandable, but it does seem a bit coy. The ensemble engages nicely in the constantly shifting dynamics — the assumptions of the positions of leader and follower, of storyteller and listener. Sometimes, though, the staging doesn't quite work: for instance, the detectives playing ping pong over Katurian's bagged head in the opening scene, while evident in purpose, is more of a distraction for both audience and actors than an artistic vehicle. But the overall production remains fairly tight, and at least consistently interesting. The violence described in the play isn't really much worse than what crops up in Grimm brothers' fairy tales, Edward Gorey books, or the fables of Struwwelpeter (also brought to the stage in 1997's Julian Crouch-helmed Shockheaded Peter). PURE's stark, disturbing setting involves movable chain-link cage walls and plastic drop-cloth draped along most surfaces.

Michal lies to Katurian, Katurian lies to the police, and the police lie to the brothers. It's all part of what Katurian discusses with Michal — just because something was said doesn't make it true. It's the essence of storytelling, the very thing that Katurian holds so dear.

McDonagh certainly knows how to spin a good yarn in the tradition of Irish storytelling. His play is a collection of short stories, in a way; it is comprised of stories the way Katurian is made up of his stories. His engaging tales, woven together with each of the characters' histories, make up for an exciting play. PURE's production serves it well, and reminds us of the power of simply telling good stories.

PURE Hails New Year with 'Pillowman'

by Dottie Ashley, Post and Courier

Pure Theatre is not letting any sand slip through the hourglass during the first week of 2007.

The avant-garde theater company will welcome the theatrical new year with the Olivier Award-winning "The Pillowman," opening Friday in the troupe's black-box theater at the Cigar Factory.

Written by Martin McDonagh, who also penned the award-winning "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," "The Pillowman" is an ideal stage vehicle for director Peter Karapetkov.

Born in Bulgaria, where he worked as a theater director, Karapetkov says, "One question posed by this play is: What is acceptable to be said or written in a free society, and what is not? When is a statement considered to be unpatriotic or wrong?"

Karapetkov knows what life is like in a totalitarian state. In 1989, he was hired to direct the Bulgarian classic "The Dragon's Wedding" in the city of Gori in what was then Soviet Georgia, the birthplace of Stalin.

On April 9, 1989, the Soviet army crushed a peaceful protest of Georgians asking that Georgian, rather than Russian, be their official language and that the television station broadcast in Georgian.

It was a vigil held at night with women and men holding candles; it ended with a Soviet tank driving over the protesters and the soldiers beating some of them to death with shovels. The lead actor in "The Dragon's Wedding" was one of the 22 people killed.

Later, when Karapetkov spoke at an underground-movement meeting, he merely said, "During the Second World War, the fascists walked with blood; now the Communists are doing the same. Please tell me the difference."

The meeting was attended by several members of the KGB, and Karapetkov was arrested and placed in a holding cell for three days, after which some friends paid to have him released. He was driven to the border of Georgia, where he was let out, and eventually he made his way to the American Embassy in Vienna. After 11 months in a refugee camp, he received permission to travel to New York in 1990, where he began his career as a director and teacher, notably including a stint at Rice University.

More than a year ago, he moved to Charleston with his wife and their 2-year-old child, largely because of the connection he made with Rodney Lee Rogers and Sharon Graci, co-founders of Pure Theatre, and because his in-laws live on Seabrook Island. Today, Karapetkov works as a founding member of the Fourth World Theatre Lab in New York, to which he frequently commutes, and also directs in various theaters throughout the country.

"The Pillowman" deals with a writer who is interrogated about his nightmarish short stories because of their similarities to a number of murders that later occur in the town. Karapetkov explains, "This play is more relevant today than it would have been a decade ago; the line between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable is rarely clear, and we should be watching and questioning this (trend). In fact, we should be screaming in protest at the top of our lungs when we hear it is unpatriotic to say one thing today, and another thing tomorrow."

When on Broadway in 2005, "The Pillowman" won a Best Play award from the New York Drama Critics Circle and a Best Play nomination for a Tony Award, among other honors. It also was winner of a Tony Award for Best Set Design.

A native of London, playwright McDonagh dropped out of school at 16 and went on the dole. He then borrowed a how-to book on writing and tried his hand at short stories and television scripts. "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," an enormous hit, was written in only eight days. By age 26, McDonagh became the first dramatist since Shakespeare to have four of his works professionally produced on the London stage in a single season.

"The Pillowman" will feature Rogers, R.W. Smith, Matt Bivins, Nat Jones and Sullivan Graci-Hamilton.