BACKSTORY

(cw: child abuse, child murder)

Once upon a time, in an unnamed totalitarian country...

There was a writer, Katurian, who was literally born to be a writer. From an early age, his parents provided him with all the best writing supplies and encouraged him with their every breath to the best author he could be. Spoiled tremendously, Katurian flourished under his parents. He wrote wonderful, whimsical tales and desired nothing more than to tell stories for the rest of his life. Starting the night of his seventh birthday, however, strange, unsettling noises began to emerge from the room next to his bedroom, the one his parents had bolted shut and forbidden him to enter. Screaming. Crying. The sounds of power tools whirling for hours on end. When he asked his parents about these horrifying sounds, they attributed them to his wonderful imagination, claiming that only “extraordinarily talented” little boys could hear it. With time, his stories grew darker and more morbid, the nightly sounds of torture shaping each and every one of his creative thoughts.

On the night of his fourteenth birthday, however, he noticed a note written in blood that had been slipped out from under the door to the locked room.

They have loved you and tortured me for seven straight years for no reason other than as an artistic experiment, an artistic experiment which has worked. You don’t write about little green pigs any more, do you?

It was signed ‘Your brother.’

Bewildered, Katurian took an axe to the door and found that the note was true, that there was a boy in there who was most likely the brother he never knew he had, and that his parents had been treating both of them as experiments their entire life. After rescuing his brother, he snuck into his parents’ bedroom and smothered both of them to death with a pillow.

Flash forward to years later, with both Katurian and his older brother, Michal, as adults. The years of torture had left Michal traumatized and brain-damaged, and so Katurian looked after him, taking a job at a local slaughterhouse to make ends meet while he spent the rest of his time writing. His stories were always morbid and often featured children being maimed, tortured, or killed. The play opens with Katurian being brought in for questioning because someone had been killing children in the same manner as his stories.

That someone, to Katurian’s horror, was Michal. Michal confessed to Katurian once they were placed in the same cell, claiming that Katurian told him to do it, that if he wrote happier stories and they had better parents, maybe none of this would had happened. Pitying his brother and knowing that they were both certain to be executed, he waited until his brother was asleep before smothering him to death with a pillow, sobbing the entire time. In his confession to the police, he wrote that he killed his brother to “save him from the torture and execution at the hands of his captors” and then took the blame for all of the murders, as well as a third, yet undiscovered victim his brother had told him he buried by their parents. His confession was under the conditions that, though he would be executed, his stories would be saved.

As it turned out, however, his brother hadn’t killed the third victim – he instead acted out another story with her, an innocent, cheerful story with a happy ending about a green colored pig that Katurian had written before the torture began all those years ago. It became obvious, then, that Katurian’s confession was false, and that he was in fact entirely innocent save for the murder of his parents and his brother. Those murders still warranted an execution, however, and that he had faked his confession meant his stories could no longer be saved. In the end, he was killed, convinced that all of his life’s work had been for nothing.

...Except one of the police officers related to him, took pity on him, and never burned his stories after all.