Despite its soft and cuddly title, The Pillowman is anything but. Martin McDonagh's play is a gruesome and darkly funny look at artistic responsibility.

The Pillowman is receiving a satisfying production at Mobtown Players.

 The audience consisted of just six people the night I was there, perhaps because a play about brutal child murders isn't everyone's cup of tea. That's a pity, because The Pillowman is far more engrossing than its gory subject matter might indicate. McDonagh seems to be asking whether it is ever appropriate for an artist to censor his own imagination.

The plot is McDonagh's meditation on the question of whether violent works of art can themselves inspire real-life violence. The most famous example is John Hinckley Jr., whose attempt on the life of then-President Ronald Reagan was traced by his attorneys to his obsessive fascination with Martin Scorcese's landmark film Taxi Driver.

In The Pillowman, a writer named Katurian, who lives in a totalitarian state, is being interrogated by the police, who have noticed a disturbing similarity between short stories that he has written and a brutal series of child murders that have terrorized the town. The two main suspects are Katurian himself, or his mentally-deficient brother, Michal, who was himself brutalized as a child.

Several of Katurian's stories are retold in the course of the play; suffice it to say that one of the "gentlest," if that word can be used, is the story which gives the show its title. In it, a being made entirely of pillows attempts to persuade young children to commit suicide before they grow up and embark on the miserably unhappy fates that lie in store for them. "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" it is not.

McDonagh is fascinated by irony, and he is fascinated by everything about writing stories, including the amoral nature of the writer's imagination. One of the funniest bits of the play occurs when one of the detectives reveals that he himself has written a short story, and Katurian attempts to give the detective some helpful literary criticism.

The cast standouts are Dave Gamble and Noel Schively as the two detectives. Gamble has a fey elegance that only underscores his brutality; nonetheless, when discussing a personal tragedy in his own life, real pain clouds his face. Schively, as the ironically named Ariel (after Shakespeare's ethereal sprite) is always on the verge of exploding with a rage that flushes his face and tenses the sinews in his neck.

Michael Byrne Zemarel (Katurian) and Todd Krickler (Katurian's mentally-challenged brother, Michal) inhabit their characters less fully -- but then again, they have been cast in the two most difficult roles.

Director Alex Willis is quite adept at building an atmosphere of almost unbearable pathos and irony. She is less skilled at developing the black humor underlying every moment in the play -- a humor that makes the grotesque bits more bearable.

All in all, though, this is a production that deserves to be seen, if only for what it says about the dark and yet somehow wonderful potential of the human imagination.