There seems to be no middle ground on Killer Joe. In the seven years since Tracy Letts' initial foray into playwriting premiered at the Next Theatre Lab, critics have reacted with enthusiastic accolades or enthusiastic vilifications. In 1993, the Chicago Tribune's Richard Christiansen praised the play "not only for the skill of its craftsmanship but for the depths of characterization that Letts has created for his bizarre tale." Hedy Weiss in the Sun-Times denounced it as "a hideous carnival of brutal degradation that leaves you numb and dirty." And the Reader's Jack Helbig, after acknowledging its literary and theatrical merits, ultimately found in the play "something so nasty, brutish and misogynistic [that] it all but cancels out the work's finer qualities."
Despite the ambivalence of its initial assessment, Killer Joe proceeded to draw sellout crowds in Chicago for eight months. After productions by small companies in Albany and New York's Chelsea district, the newly-christened Hired Gun Production company--whose roster included original creative team members Letts, director Wilson Milam, actors Michael Shannon, Holly Wantuch, Marc A. Nelson, and Shawna Franks (with Eric Winzenried replacing Paul Dillon in the title role)--took their play to the 1994 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it promptly won a Fringe First award and attracted the attention of Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director at London's Bush Theatre.
Opening in the London pub-and-performance space in January 1995, Killer Joe proved an immediate hit with playgoers more comfortable at cross-cultural ridicule than their Yankee counterparts, as well as with British critics, who compared it to Jacobean tragedy and the Kitchen-Sink school of drama. "The enduring impact comes not from the violence itself, but the ease with which violent thoughts are accommodated," wrote Tom Morris in the Guardian. "Cynical, sick, exploitive and gross, but schlock horror doesn't come funnier or more compelling than this," chortled the Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer. And readers of the Independent were assured by Irving Wardle that Killer Joe "has huge comic vitality as a projection of the American underclass." A transfer to the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End soon followed.
That left only New York to be conquered (the 1994 staging by the 29th Street Rep having been largely ignored by the press). With its West End cachets and a cast now featuring Scott Glenn and Amanda Plummer in lead roles, Killer Joe crept into Lower Manhattan's SoHo Theatre in 1998.
