Up In One said: "Matilda and sections of Finding Neverland
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I agree. throughout Finding Neverland I was thinking of the odd relationship between Barrie and those boys and how two would end up committing suicide.
I was very disturbed (in a good way) by a play I saw at Fringe a few years ago called "Viral" by Mac Rogers. A suicidal woman falls in with a group of people who have a sexual fetish for watching people die, but peacefully as opposed to violently. They propose to help her carry out the suicide if they can film it to sell as porn. I don't think it's been done since Fringe, but it got good press and I still remember it vividly.
Anything by Sarah Kane. I've read all of her plays and have written about them a few times. I particularly found Cleansed to be very uncomfortable, especially with rape, behandings, and rats eating body parts, and I'm pretty sure Tinker is the character Kane bases off of a theatre critic that disliked her.
Edward Bond's Saved, which was an inspiration for Kane's Blasted, has a disturbing scene involving a baby. I don't want to give it away, but I can only imagine how the audience felt during this scene.
Got to love the twisted British playwrights. They're so damn good.
The Pillowman is one of my favorite plays but it really messed me up. Equus is another crazy one. I also just read Halley Feiffer's I'm Gonna Pray For You So Hard and found that pretty disquieting.
I don't have anything new to add. I saw Pillowman twice and I loved it. Don't know what that says about me. All of Martin McDonagh's plays are on the dark side, although they're mixed with humor. His only play I haven't seen is Behanding in Spokane, and I'm still upset I missed it. I saw Bug at Barrow St and that was pretty disturbing. I wish I saw Killer Joe because I like the film a lot. Can't think of anything else. I think Neil LaBute has some darker stuff.
Neil Labute's Autobahn collection is really disturbing, too. One of the plays is about a woman trying to remember the details of her rape. Another involves a young man who suddenly grows to fear her girlfriend when she reveals all the horrible things she did to the last man who tried to break up with her. Wild stuff.
I remember how incredible "LULU" was when I saw it at the Berkeley Rep.
SPOILER: The ending was really intense when jack the ripper slices Lulu's mouth off and it is in his hands dripping blood.
"Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around."
1984 at the ART was one of the most disturbing shows I've ever seen. In a good way....mostly.
If we're not having fun, then why are we doing it?
These are DISCUSSION boards, not mutual admiration boards. Discussion only occurs when we are willing to hear what others are thinking, regardless of whether it is alignment to our own thoughts.
Glittergrrl said: "I don't have anything new to add. I saw Pillowman twice and I loved it. Don't know what that says about me. All of Martin McDonagh's plays are on the dark side, although they're mixed with humor. His only play I haven't seen is Behanding in Spokane, and I'm still upset I missed it. I saw Bug at Barrow St and that was pretty disturbing. I wish I saw Killer Joe because I like the film a lot. Can't think of anything else. I think Neil LaBute has some darker stuff.
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I stagedoored Realistic Jones' just to ask Tracy Letts about Killer Joe and he said "he hoped" it would be revived in NYC in the near future.
Of course that was 2 years ago.
I've seen the film and I saw a very dark version in a small black box in Watertown, MA a couple years ago.
For me, the two most disturbing plays I've seen would have to be Philip Ridley's MERCURY FUR and Sarah Kane's CLEANSED (the current revival at the National Theatre in London actually caused me to do something I've never done before in a theatre...I passed out, albeit briefly).
Both of them contain horrific imagery that stayed with me long after the actual performance, and MF also has some descriptive passages in the dialogue that are truly the stuff of nightmares.
Well, I gotta say- that bit someone posted about the boys in Finding Neverland who killed themselves certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Now I'm rethinking everything I thought I knew about THAT story...oof...