Last Saturday, to get ourselves in the mood to see a play about John Wayne Gacy, my friend Randall and I paid a visit to the site of Gacy’s northwest-suburban home, where he buried many of the 33 young men and boys he tortured and killed in the 70s.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I knew Gacy was the creepy clown with the crawl space and a penchant for brutal gay sex, but that was about it. I didn’t know about the pedophilia. I didn’t know that he stuffed his victims’ underwear or socks into their mouths to silence their screaming as he tortured, raped, and strangled them. Randall, who’s done quite a bit of research into famous serial killers, filled me in on some of those tidbits and more. Randall has a theory about Gacy: that he was more spider than human. With a chilling efficiency he lured victim after victim to his lair, where he didn’t just kill them but first sucked them dry. He wasn’t mean; killing was simply his nature. I’m not sure what I think of that theory, but thinking about it makes me more than a little scared of the human race. Not excluding Randall.
Even the driveway felt ominous. As soon as I forced myself to walk the length of it I regretted it. I saw a couple forlorn trees, a shovel leaned against the back of the house, a window slightly ajar. I couldn’t look inside very long for fear of what might look back at me.
Randall was starting to scare me more than the evil vibes from the place, but scariest of all was the thought of being alone, so I grabbed his arm. Spaced-out on fear, I didn’t notice that he was scanning our surroundings intently, searching for something. When I snapped out of it I was being jerked across the yard.
The play, which ended its run last weekend but will be remounted in the near future, is full of cheap tricks and bad-taste punch lines. I couldn’t follow the most important part of the plot, where a detective devises some cockamamy scheme to plant dead bodies in Gacy’s home, rationalizing it by somehow drawing clues from the text on the back of a Rolling Rock bottle. But the scenes that use events from Gacy’s life not to educate but to shock–such as a prison cell visit from GG Allin in which Allin, played by Scott himself, apparently shoots something up his arm after physically attacking the most vulnerable-looking people in the audience–were well worth the confusing lulls in the half-baked dialogue.
