Written in 1993, Killer Joe is a play about the Smiths, a dysfunctional family living in a mobile home in Texas. The family, made up of Chris, a young man with a plan, by his father Ansel, his stepmother Sharla and his younger sister Dottie, are in a delicate financial situation. In a desperate attempt to change their fate, they hire a contract killer, Joe Cooper, to murder Ansel’s ex-wife so they can collect her life insurance policy. Experiencing a decadent and extreme reality, the Smiths will be confronted with a mirror image of themselves and the inevitability of tragedy in a situation that will place them face to face with the consequences of their own decisions. Raw and violent, but equally humorous and radiant, Killer Joe portrays the contemporary reality we live in, of indifference towards the Other, a metaphor for the consequences of social media that could already be anticipated in the 1990s, and for a society ever more self-centred, narcissistic and nihilistic.

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