Malkovich Probes His Dark Side at BAM

“I’m not a particularly dark person,” John Malkovich was saying in his precise, haunting drawl. Yes, he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the creepy assassin in “In The Line of Fire,” and made his debut on a New York stage as one of the violent brothers in Sam Shepard’s “True West.”  But the characters are not the man.

Indeed, he recalled vividly how a director “put his hands around my throat and screamed at the top of his lungs that I was a Pollyanna.”

Actually, that could count as a dark story.

It does not compare, however, to the deeply bizarre tale of the real-life Austrian murderer whom Malkovich is portraying in The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer, which is being presented in four performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this weekend.

The show’s star, along with its director and conductor, spoke at an Artists Talk this week at BAMCafe, attempting to explain their unusual work, which is officially billed as a “musical stage play for one actor, a chamber orchestra, and two sopranos.”

It is based on the life of Jack Unterweger, who, as a young man, killed an 18-year-old girl and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

“After a certain number of years, he began a quite clever campaign to have himself released on the grounds he had been rehabilitated,” Malkovich said.

Unterweger took college courses in prison, and began writing, culminating in a memoir called Purgatory, which resulted in his becoming a cause célèbre among Viennese literati.  They successfully petitioned the government to give him parole.

“He became a celebrated novelist—not a very good one,” Malkovich said, “and a celebrated playwright who directed his own plays.”

He also worked as a journalist. He covered a string of murders of prostitutes in Vienna, interviewing the police working the case and women of the street afraid for their lives. He took a trip to Los Angeles to write about the sex industry there, interviewing three prostitutes. It took a long time for the police to realize that Unterweger himself had killed the Viennese women he then wrote about, and strangled to death the California women he had interviewed.

Malkovich remembers visiting Austria and seeing him on television before his crimes were exposed, and thinking him a fraud. “The story has always interested me as a character.” 

Several years ago, Malkovich was introduced to the Austrian conductor Martin Haselbock and they decided they wanted to collaborate on a piece that combined theater and classical music. They picked some of the musical pieces they wanted to include before they even decided that their subject would be Unterweger, which took six months.  They brought on Michael Sturminger to write the text and direct.

 In the piece that eventually resulted, Jack is giving a reading of his new book, The Infernal Comedy,  as part of a promotional book tour, and telling his life story.  We quickly learn that Jack has in fact been dead for 15 years; it is his ghost speaking to us.

“Everything Unterweger says is a lie,” the actor playing him says. “And most of what he says is subterfuge. But every line he tells reveals something.”

Malkovich’s monologues alternate with classical songs (arias by Mozart, Weber,  Vivaldi, Boccherini).  Eventually the two parts converge in a startling and vicious way.

Malkovich sees The Infernal Comedy as the serial killer’s “personal struggle against the music, which is the voice of the victims.”

The show so far has toured throughout the United States and in some 20 countries, to mixed reviews and varied reactions. “People in different countries laugh in very different places,” says Sturminger. Laugh?

“The piece has incredible lightness of touch,” Malkovich says, reflecting the fact that Unterweger himself could be funny and charming.

Asked how he prepared for the role, Malkovich said he read a lot about Unterweger, and “worked a lot on the sound of it.” But he also compared himself to a surfer, going out to the water and waiting for the wave. “A lot of actors mistake themselves for the wave. The wave is created by the collision between the material and the public,” he said.

I asked Malkovich if the killers he has played have anything in common. “They all get some degree of enjoyment in hurting others. To me and most normal people, it’s unfathomable. I can’t imagine being able to live with yourself. But,” he adds, “it takes all kinds, I suppose.”

The Infernal Comedy will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Nov. 17 to 19 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 19 at 2 p.m.