An Ideal Place, Except for All the Dead Bodies
In ‘The Killer,’ Ionesco’s Everyman Seeks a Source of Evil

There are little-known plays by well-known writers that, when once viewed, strike you as being unjustly, even criminally neglected. Eugene Ionesco’s “The Killer” is not one of them. Au contraire! This is the kind of rarity that theater aficionados may be eager to see until they have the misfortune of seeing it. Produced by Theater for a New Audience, the commendably inquisitive classical company now housed in spiffy new Brooklyn digs, and directed by Darko Tresnjak (a Tony nominee for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder”), “The Killer” stars a flagrantly miscast Michael Shannon as Berenger, the Everyman character who appears in other Ionesco works. Berenger’s persona and history tend to shift from play to play. In “The Killer,” he is a sad but dream-haunted innocent who retains an abiding belief in the potential for life to be as full of joy as he had once, in a moment of transcendence, experienced it in his youth.