Love Kills

Clayton has been at the helm of Theatre Inconnu since 1978, when he co-founded it with fellow UVic student Katya Kern. Aside from serving as actor, director, or designer for more than 80 Inconnu shows, he has logged close to 1000 performances of various solo shows in North America and Europe. Clayton has completed three degrees at the UVic theatre department, and served as Artist in Residence at Bishop’s University in Quebec. This fall he is invited to New York’s United Solo Festival to perform Stephen Mulrine’s Moscow Stations. He hopes Love Kills will win over many new Inconnu converts and doles out huge hugs to the fine cast and crew!

In 1958, nineteen year-old Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate went on a killing spree that resulted in the deaths of eleven innocent victims, including Fugate’s entire immediate family. The senseless, seemingly unprovoked nature of their brief and explosive burst of violence has continued to fascinate and disturb ever since, inspiring artists to wrestle with the themes growing out of this story. Books, movies, and songs have all attempted to explore Charlie and Caril’s actions, including Bruce Springsteen’s song “Nebraska,” and films by Oliver Stone (Natural Born Killers) and Terence Malick (Badlands). Taking someone else’s life against their will has to remain an unimaginable act. And stories such as this demand that we grapple with the motivations and implications behind, and resulting from, the action of cutting a life short through violence. Most of us are empathic beings. Yet how can we allow our innate propensity to “put ourselves in the other’s shoes” play itself out, when the “other” has denied his or her own empathic inclinations by perpetrating unspeakable violence? Is this the conundrum that keeps drawing us into the worlds of such people as Charlie and Caril? Perhaps efforts such as Jarrow’s – to look empathically at one specific horrific case – are motivated by a need to find the human understanding that may just somehow lead to ending the parade of comparable acts unfolding around us second by second in this insane world.