By Lucy Komisar
There’s a moment late in the second act of “KenRex” when the lights flash, the sound crashes, and Jack Holden becomes, for the thirty-fifth time, someone else entirely. By then, you’ve stopped counting. You’ve stopped wondering how one actor does it. You’re just gripping your armrest, watching a small town finally do what the law wouldn’t. This isn’t just good theater—it’s essential, electrifying storytelling.
This true-crime thriller, written by Holden and Ed Stambollouian and directed by Stambollouian, tells the story of Ken Rex McElroy—a man so vicious, so malevolent, that for a decade he brutalized the 400-person town of Skidmore, Missouri, with apparent impunity. The play opens in an unusual framing device: an FBI official (the unseen voice of Kelly Burke) takes the deposition of U.S. prosecutor David Baird. Why the FBI is involved is never made clear, and the play is smart enough not to force an answer. Sometimes the mystery is the point.
We know McElroy’s fate from the start. That’s not a spoiler; it’s history. Born in 1934, McElroy was accused of dozens of crimes—child molestation, statutory rape, cattle rustling, arson, assault. The play’s genius is in making us wait for the inevitable anyway, taut with suspense even when we know where this is headed. That’s the mark of a truly terrific play: it makes the inevitable feel unbearable.
Holden’s performance, with the important direction of Stambollouian, is the engine—and what an engine. Playing 35 characters—men, women, lawyers, victims, the monstrous McElroy himself—he moves through Anisha Fields’s spare set (dominated by a giant tape recorder with two round reels) with a chameleon’s precision. His McElroy is a physical marvel of revulsion: 250 pounds, one arm hanging, body twisted like he’s perpetually stalking. A construction accident that left him with a steel plate in his skull becomes the play’s dark metaphor—a man literally held together by metal, incapable of feeling consequence.
The town lacks a police force. Cops take an hour to arrive, if they come at all. McElroy’s lawyer, Dennis McFadden (another terrific Holden creation, all high-pitched grin and procedural cunning), gets him off every time. Did he rustle the pigs? Were they branded? How do you know who the owner was? Juries too easy to manipulate. Law enforcement too far away or too uninterested. “Because it wasn’t convenient,” the play suggests.
The turning point arrives at a Punkin Show, where a 14-year-old girl sings the national anthem. Her shadow falls across the stage. McElroy grooms her. Months later, she’s pregnant. Missouri law at the time allowed marriage to silence a minor’s testimony.
Lois, who runs the tavern, wants to help. Her husband Beau drives her to McElroy’s house. McElroy shoots him. Details like this accumulate, making Skidmore feel less like a town and more like a hostage situation. The writing is razor-sharp, the pacing impeccable.
The second act focuses on Prosecutor Baird, new to town, dangerously slow to understand what he’s dealing with. He reduces attempted murder to second-degree assault. He agrees to bail. McElroy goes on a marauding spree: torches the library, brandishes a machete. Joshua Pharo’s lighting and video design—doorways edged in red or white light, moved around to represent different buildings—turn the stage into a labyrinth of threat. Giles Thomas’s sound design layers in guitar, rock, country, loud enough to feel like a bar fight. Every technical element fires on all cylinders.
“You don’t get it,” says Ida at the bar. Baird says only the town can finish this. Fifty people show up to court to see bail withdrawn, but McFadden pulls a fast one: he’s in another town on another case.
And then the play arrives at its shattering, inevitable climax—one the audience has been dreading and craving in equal measure. It is staged with devastating restraint: the clicks of guns, smoke drifting across the audience, and then silence.
The play doesn’t moralize. It doesn’t have to. John Patrick Elliott’s original music (composed and performed live) keeps the blood moving—blue-collar rock for a town a hundred miles from Kansas City, with just a grocery, a bar, a baker, an auto repair, a school, a church. You feel the isolation. You feel the exhaustion.
If “KenRex” has a flaw, it’s the FBI framing device. It raises questions the play seems content to abandon. But that’s a small complaint for a piece this gripping, this powerful, this terrific. Holden and Stambollouian have written a thriller that’s also an elegy—for a town failed by every system meant to protect it, and for the terrible freedom of people left with no other choice.
A comment from the actor I took to the play and with which I agree: “It is an undoubtedly Herculean challenge to portray all the characters in an entire play. Uniquely ambitious, and a feat mostly carried off very well, aided by masterful direction. The story is still interesting regardless of the acrobats, but I might have loved it even more were I able to see different actors bringing life to these other characters.”
“KenRex” Written by Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian, directed by Ed Stambollouian, music composed and performed by John Patrick Elliott. Runtime 2hrs15min. Opened April 26, closes June 27th, 2026.