It was only in the 1970s that serial killers really took off, easily accommodated by an era of self and celebrity – what Tom Wolfe called the “Me” decade. A handful of nutters and obsessives redirected their veneration of rock bands and Hollywood stars to violent sociopaths, and popular culture duly responded with a flurry of books, films, and documentaries.
So when Lee Blessing wrote Down the Road in 1989, he was less interested in serial killers themselves than in popular culture’s indulgence of them. But even for a writer once called “America’s most imaginative playwright on contemporary issues” by TIME magazine, this was a bridge too far: the script is trite, porous, and tends to tell rather than show. Tracy Mathewson’s revival at Playhouse East, adapted for the age of True Crime, is therefore unconvincing, although it’s scaffolded with some fine acting and intelligent direction.
Down the Road follows husband and wife journalists Dan and Iris Heinemann (Aaron Vodovoz and Annelise Bianchini) as they write a book about serial killer Bill Reach (Joshua Collins), whom they interview in a prison in a flyover state. Dan and Iris stay in a motel by the interstate, where there is little to do but have sex, think of baby names (“Bitsy”, anyone?) and discuss what motivated Reach.
They take turns interviewing Reach, their lines of inquiry following their own interests. Dan is increasingly fascinated by the lurid details of Reach’s murders, Iris by his childhood. Reach is apathetic, handsome, and arrogant – quick to remind his interviewers that readers care more about him than about their own assessment.
Serial killers are typically overwritten, but Reach is the opposite: underwritten and insubstantial, leaving Collins’s acting to do the heavy lifting. His sudden outbursts are chilling, and he routinely breaks the fourth wall, at one point even sitting next to an audience member to whom he explains one of his kills. But the narrative development is still hampered by the flimsiness of Blessing’s writing, which undermines Reach’s deranging effects on Dan and Iris. The director has Reach wander, Banquo-like, around their motel room as they watch TV, sleep and dress, to show that he is all that they can think about.
This Down the Road has nominally been updated to fit the zeitgeist, but lots of it hasn’t been – so the audience ends up torn between two worlds, past and present. Buzzwords like “Crypto” and “AI” lazily remind us that we’re in 2025, but are interrupted by the cottage-like 1980s décor of the motel room and the frequent use of a dictaphone, among other things.
Ultimately, Down the Road is wasteful. Three fine actors, a talented director, and a beautiful new theatre space can’t rescue a hollow script that fails to offer new insights into our enduring fascination with serial killers.
Cosmo Adair is a postgraduate journalism student at City, University of London. He writes about Haggerston and very little else.