Thrill Kills
It's impossible to love the characters in Thrill Me, and impossible to resist probing their monstrous deed.
Bloated Broadway musicals sometimes blind us to the fact that musical theater comes in all sizes. Take Thrill Me, Stephen Dolginoff's two-man exploration of the relationship between law students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who together murdered a boy in 1924.
Recognizing that the 80-minute piece deserves intimacy, artistic director Jesse Cline moved seats for 125 onto the Media stage, surrounding set and lighting designer Melissa Guyer's elegantly simple, beautifully lit playing space on four sides.
"Genius," an Oscar Wilde quotation proclaims outside this transformed theater, "is a form of beauty." It's the first of many ironies. Thrill Me's Leopold and Loeb were lovers with a complex forbidden relationship, bored overachievers looking for excitement, and naive youngsters twisting Nietzsche's ubermensch ("superman") theories into justification for mayhem — but they were not particularly geniuses.
Leopold, played with likable innocence by David Standish, narrates the story through his fifth parole hearing in 1958. "We have the facts," an inquisitor says. "Do we have the truth?" After 34 years — and today, after much factual and fictional dissection — the question "why?" matters most.
Dolginoff and Cline answer with humor, much of it ironic ("We'll have life plus 99 years," sing the convicted murderers, spared the death penalty), and humanity, most of it dark. Leopold so desperately wants to please the alluring bad boy Loeb, suitably ice-cold in Joshua Rivedal's intense performance, that he assists with petty thievery and nuisance arson. Their combination of naivety and arrogance ("the police are dumber than dirt," Loeb insists) proves fatal. Proclaiming "we are above society," Loeb proposes murdering his own brother — not only fulfilling Nietzsche's vision, but allowing him the bigger bedroom.
It's impossible to love these characters — though if Dolginoff provided information about Leopold's good works in prison and after parole, we might ultimately respect him — but equally impossible to resist probing their monstrous deed, portrayed with eerie beauty in Loeb's seduction of their randomly chosen victim, "Roadster."
Cline's simple, direct staging works from all four sides, even when Standish and Rivedal threaten to close us out by playing some scenes nose-to-nose, and Christopher Ertelt's nonstop piano accompaniment drives the story. And here's a rarity: No one's miked, and no one needs to be. What a thrill!
Thrill Me
Through Feb. 18, The Media Theatre, 104 E. State St., Media, 610-891-0100, www. www.mediatheatre.org
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