The Comedy and Tragedy of Ed Gein

“That's the nice thing about insanity: evil people kill you, but crazy ones try to make you understand.”
― Seanan McGuire, A Local Habitation

The Greeks used masks to depict the opposing sides of comedy and tragedy of stories told in theater.  They thought that it was the tension between them that made stories interesting.   Shakespeare understood this in terms of "The Four Bodily Humors", blood bile melancholy and phlegm which manifested themselves as anger, grief, hope and fear.  His works have many examples of brutality and murder but none so viceral as "Coriolanus" who kills an enemy and feeds him to the man's own mother.

Certainly the life of Ed Gein has been described as a tragedy.   It has been retold as tragedies in many variations on both stage and screen beginning perhaps with Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" to "Silence of the Lambs" and Sweeny Todd.   All of which can be said to contain those "humors" and the tale of Gein is no different.

But "humor" can be understood in another way.  In Sweeny Todd Mrs. Lovett and Todd debate which type of victim makes better pies in the song, "A Little Priest".  In "Rocky Horror Show" (which is entirely a farce) Eddie is devoured by Frank N. Furter's unsuspecting guests.  And who can forget Hannibal Lechter's sarcastic claim of eating a man's liver with ".. some fava beans and a nice Chianti"?   It may explain why we often laugh after being startled.

Perhaps because it is reality and not fiction that we get stuck on the horror but Gein was all of those things.  A charming personality and dancer who called square dances as well as the chili champ of Washara County, an anecdote that often draws a quick guffaw all by itself.  So why then can we not look at the macabre realities of his tragic life with out some appreciation of the absurdist comedy of it all? 

Dan Davies' lyrics are rife with absurdist puns and contradictions pointing to not so much to the monster that Ed became but the situations that made him what he was.  Carefully researched by Mr. Davies who's own family had close connections to some of the real players in the events he relies not just on the sensational news reports of the day but the all too real pathology cited by the doctors that examined him and his own family lore who knew more back story that was never published.   Davies' sense of sardonic and sarcastic humor bubbles over in bringing out what the world may well have looked like inside of Gein's head.  What you end up with is "One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest" on steroids put to music.  Like the series "Dexter" Ed becomes the ultimate antihero bursting out in song each time his memory is triggered.

So yes,  the story of the "Butcher of Plainfield" was ripe to become a musical if not a comic opera.   So with this in mind we invite you to come and have a nervous belly laugh at the tragedy of Ed Gein The Musical.  Laugh now!  Think about it later.

UPDATE!

NETFLIX to produce the story of Ed Gein.  See Link