‘Killer Joe’ and intense, graphic portrait of Texas trailer trash

Choked. Slapped. Kicked. Brutally forced into a humiliating sex act.

(Simulated, of course.)

The lady -- and she certainly is that offstage -- is fearless onstage.

"I like the grittier character types," says actress Mary Foresta, on a rehearsal break from portraying Sharla, the very definition of a "trailer trash" wife and the receptacle of one male character's cruelty.

"Slutty" would not be an out-of-bounds description for this gum-chewing broad who sprays cheap perfume everywhere from her kneecaps to more exotic places -- "fumigating the gates of hell," as her character's husband describes it.

"It's so different from my regular life. She is my favorite character so far."

That's despite grabbing her nose and nursing a boo-boo during a slo-mo fight sequence run-through as the carefully choreographed moves had changed from the previous night's rehearsal. "But everybody is really safe," she maintains. "We take the fights super-slow, and you feel comfortable."

Be forewarned. "Killer Joe" is, on one level, simply a play. On another, it's guerrilla theater.

"We've pushed it a little further than we should," says Shawn Hackler, director of the hard-core Tracy Letts thriller that, in the intimate BackStage Theatre at the College of Southern Nevada -- with the audience mere feet from the stage on three sides -- puts some tough stuff right in theatergoers' faces.

Tough enough to warrant this notice at the box office: "Includes offensive language, intense, graphic violence, explicit sexual content and situations. ... Parents highly cautioned, not recommended for children 17 or under."

Take it seriously. "Some people might be offended, but when I'm an audience member, it's fun when I'm challenged to go beyond comfort levels," Hackler says. "When you're right there and you're confronted with it, there's nowhere you can go, nowhere to escape to. Beyond the plot, there's an experience to be had."

Described as a dark comedy -- blackout conditions might be more accurate -- "Killer Joe" feeds off greed, lust and murder in its story of a family in a Dallas-area trailer park that hires a police detective, who's also a hit man on the side, to take out the matriarch for the insurance dough. As a retainer, Killer Joe takes the daughter to bed, eventually triggering a bloody denouement. Starring are TJ Larsen, Alex Olson, Jamie Carvelli, Joseph Hammond and Foresta.

"There are scenes that are, well, I'm going to say intimate, but not necessarily in a good way," says Larsen, aka Joe. "Killer Joe at one point completely dominates one of the other characters and it's hard for me, because I think I'm a pretty nice person, to delve into those realms, and I'm sure it's hard for Mary Foresta, who plays the character on the other end of the intimidation. But we've trusted each other and bonded as a cast."

Doubling as the show's "fight captain," Larsen slowly and carefully practices his violent dances with several members of the cast, using a blow to the chest to fell co-star Olson, who takes a perfect stage fall in character as Chris, an in-debt drug dealer. Wrapping his hands around Foresta's neck, Larsen fake-slaps her -- "I got you a little low so the knuckles wouldn't get to the meat," he tells her -- then lets her drop like a rag doll.

"Your timing was so good on bringing your hand up," he tells her, then they return to the characters. "Go (expletive) yourself," Sharla tells Joe (not an uncommon phrase in this show, as well as multiple variations on that theme). "Insult me again," Larsen's Joe growls to his victim on the ground, "and I'll cut your face off and wear it as my own."

Taking a break, Larsen walks out to escape both the emotional and physical heat of the theater, sweat dripping off his forehead. "This show is incredibly physical," Larsen says. "I went into a training program about two months ago when I knew I'd landed the role and I knew I'd have to be in better shape than I was, so I've taken off about 30 pounds of fat and added muscle."

So screechy is some of the "Killer Joe" rehearsal that it draws complaints from people practicing in the nearby Nicholas J. Horn Theatre, as Larsen and Olson fake-slug each other on the floor, Larsen on top, administering a beating. Olson's legs flail out furiously. "Your kicking is kind of comical," director Hackler tells Olson. "You're not kicking. You're using the ground as leverage to fight him." Later, Olson's limp body winds up stuffed into an empty refrigerator.

Though many productions of "Killer Joe" feature frontal nudity, CSN's production will not, though both nudity and violence will be portrayed, helped along by multimedia projections. Expect stage blood, too. "We got what we needed without having to strip down," Hackler says, noting that theatergoers shouldn't read any grand ideas into "Killer Joe," which was the debut play of Letts, whose masterpiece so far, "August: Osage County," won a Pulitzer Prize for drama.

"No deeper meaning, nothing to go to the coffee house (and discuss)," Hackler says. "I've stuck with that idea, just a fun piece of theater to do where you don't have to walk away with too much." Larsen theorizes that "Killer Joe" was Letts' exercise to see how far he could push violence and sex onstage and still have a "through-line."

Rehearsing Act II, Larsen and Foresta reach perhaps the most intense scene, as Killer Joe forces Sharla to her knees for oral sex, talking to her in a chillingly calm, condescending tone. "It took watching some videos I would never normally watch," Foresta admits. "It was very awkward, knowing TJ, being friends, but then having to do something like that, it's probably the craziest thing I've ever had to do in theater."

Nothing that happens in "Killer Joe" is ever far from -- and sometimes past -- crazy.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.