This essay explores theatre's power to take an audience beyond the veil of civilization into an encounter with the human as monstrous. Through the mythology and theatre of the Greeks, through Shakespeare, and into contemporary plays and productions by Bond, Albee, Osborne, and Bejart, the figure of the ‘overreacher’ emerges as a common thread. In extraordinary performances in his own Talbot’s Box and Double Cross, Kilroy traces the role of the actor in exteriorizing the disturbing paradox of the monster as violation and as beauty.
