You’d expect Michael Shannon to play the title role in “The Killer.” Broody and intense, he’s best known for tortured, often villainous characters — think General Zod in “Man of Steel” or the screwed-up turncoat agent Nelson van Alden of “Boardwalk Empire.”
But Shannon isn’t the blood-thirsty one in Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 drama — he’s the mild-mannered Berenger, who ends up falling down a very dark rabbit hole.
We meet him on his visit of the “radiant city,” a paradise of urban planning whose amiable architect (Robert Stanton) has even ruled out rain.
There’s a snag, though: A serial killer (Ryan Quinn) is on the loose, offing random strangers. It seems inevitable he’ll catch up to Berenger, but it takes three starkly different acts to get there.
The first is deceptively straightforward. The set is bare, with just Berenger and the architect dominating most of it — it’s your basic 1950s, gently absurdist avant-play.
In the second act we’re in Berenger’s shabby apartment building, overseen by a fussy concierge (Kristine Nielsen). Here, he runs into his friend Edward (Shannon’s excellent “Boardwalk Empire” co-star Paul Sparks), a pasty-faced, whiny-voiced fellow with a mangled hand and a racking cough. Turns out Edward’s connected to the killer.
All hell breaks loose in the third act, in which a crowd hails a fascistic leader named Ma Piper (Nielsen again), police beat up bystanders, including Berenger. As if this weren’t enough, our hero ends up facing the killer, and must plead for his life. And plead he does, in a monologue — interrupted only by the killer’s maniacal cackle — that goes on and on.
Some directors edit Shakespeare, so you wonder why Darko Tresnjak (who received a Tony nomination for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder”) couldn’t have snipped Ionesco. Not to mention that his staging isn’t nearly as radical as the play itself — the result is overlong, yet still falls short.