KENREX — Off-Broadway Guide
One performer. 35 characters. A folk-Americana score played live on stage. The true story of a Missouri bully who terrorized a town for a decade — and what happened in broad daylight when the town had finally had enough. Here is what it is and whether it fits your night.
July 10, 1981. Skidmore, Missouri. Ken Rex McElroy — a bully, a predator, and a man indicted on more than 20 crimes who had never spent a single night in jail — was shot dead in the middle of the afternoon on the main street of town. There were approximately 60 witnesses. Not one of them saw anything. The case remains officially unsolved.
KENREX — the play Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian built from that story — is not a whodunit. Everyone in Skidmore knew what happened and why. The play is about something more uncomfortable: what it means when a community decides that the law has failed them so thoroughly that they have to handle it themselves. It is about the decade of terror that preceded that afternoon, the legal system that kept producing acquittals, and the silence that followed. Holden plays all 35 characters in the story — every voice in Skidmore, plus McElroy himself — against a live folk-Americana score performed on stage by composer John Patrick Elliott. The result, after three sold-out London runs including a five-star West End engagement, is now at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village through June 27, 2026.
What the London Critics Said
The London reception matters as context, not as guarantee. KENREX arrives in New York after three sold-out runs — Sheffield, Southwark Playhouse, The Other Palace — each building the production’s reputation before it crossed the Atlantic. The five-star response is consistent, but the more useful information for planning purposes is descriptive rather than evaluative: this is an intense, morally complex, formally inventive solo performance, and the audiences it rewards are specific.
What Kind of Show This Actually Is
KENREX is not a play in the conventional sense — two or three actors, a set, scenes. It is something more concentrated and unusual: a single performer moving through 35 separate characters, building a complete portrait of a community and a criminal through rapid transformation, against a live score that functions less as background music and more as a narrative engine driving the shape of the story. John Patrick Elliott sits on stage throughout, playing his folk-Americana score — rock guitar, synthesized sound, original compositions — as Holden shifts from character to character around him.
The London Theatre review described the stagecraft precisely: Holden conjures a complete scene with little more than a microphone. A shift in posture, a change in vocal register, and he is a different person entirely — the sullen, slanted-walking McElroy in one moment, his slippery defense attorney in the next, then the elderly butcher McElroy shot, then the small-town radio DJ, then McElroy’s 14-year-old pregnant wife. The score pulses underneath all of it, amplifying tension, punctuating revelations, and grounding the audience in the specific dusty, isolated feeling of rural Missouri in 1981. The production’s sparse design — a movable stepladder, an LED-lit doorway — leaves Holden’s body and voice as the only scenery. There is nowhere to hide and nothing to distract from what he is doing.
This is not documentary theater in the sense of a talking-heads reconstruction. It is not a prestige courtroom drama. It is not an ethical lecture about vigilante justice. The structure accumulates viewpoints rather than resolving into a thesis — you leave understanding why the town did what it did without being told whether it was right. That ambiguity, which the London critics consistently noted as one of the production’s greatest strengths, is what separates KENREX from a more conventionally framed true-crime narrative.
The Tone — Propulsive, Dark, Not a Comfortable Night
The score description — folk-Americana, with blasts of rock guitar and synthesized sound — is telling. KENREX is not a somber, slow-moving piece of theater that sits with its material in quiet contemplation. It moves. The production has a kinetic, building energy, a sense of mounting pressure as McElroy’s crimes accumulate and the justice system fails again and again. The score drives that accumulation. By the time the story reaches its conclusion, the production has constructed something that feels less like watching a play and more like being inside a pressure cooker that has finally given way.
That theatrical intensity is the show’s main attraction for the audience it is built for. It is also the reason it is explicitly not for every audience. The material is brutal — a decade of violence against a community, the specific cruelties of McElroy’s crimes (which included grooming and abusing a teenager he would later marry at 15), and the final act of collective violence. The production handles all of it without sensationalism, which is the harder and more honest choice. But it does not sanitize it either. The content warnings are extensive because the subject matter is extensive, and the play takes it seriously.
There is something specific about watching one person embody 35 characters — victim and perpetrator and bystander and grieving community and complicit system — in rapid succession. In a conventional production, different actors play different roles, and the moral weight is distributed. Here it is all concentrated in one body. Holden playing both McElroy and the people he terrorized, both the failed system and the townspeople who chose to circumvent it, creates a compression that a standard ensemble play cannot replicate. The effect, consistently noted by critics across the London runs, is that the moral complexity is not presented as abstract — it is embodied, simultaneously, in one person.
This is why the production reads as closer to a live fever dream than to a conventional stage drama. It is not comfortable. It is not supposed to be.
KENREX contains haze, flashing lights, strobe lighting, loud noises, gunshot sound effects, depictions of physical violence and death, strong language, and references to grooming, rape, sexual and physical abuse. Recommended for audiences 12 and up. These are not peripheral elements — they are central to the story the play is telling about McElroy’s crimes and their impact on the town of Skidmore.
Who Should See KENREX — and Who Should Choose Something Else
- True-crime audiences who want something theatrical rather than a podcast retelling
- Theatergoers drawn to solo performance as a form — transformation, virtuosity, single-body storytelling
- Audiences who like dark material handled with intelligence rather than exploitation
- People who want a morally complex night that resists easy conclusions
- Anyone who responds to the intersection of live music and performance — the score is not decorative
- Repeat NYC visitors looking for something more adventurous than the Off-Broadway default
- Audiences familiar with the Skidmore killing and wanting to see how a stage production handles the ambiguity
- The content warnings concern you — the material about abuse and violence is present and not softened
- Your group wants a broadly accessible, easygoing comedy or musical
- You are attending with mixed-age groups including children under 12
- You want a warm, uplifting, or emotionally comfortable night at the theater
- You prefer a conventional ensemble cast and traditional dramatic structure
- The topic of vigilante justice and American systemic failure is not what you want to sit with for 2+ hours
The most important framing for this show: KENREX is not “true crime on stage” in the same sense that a dramatized crime documentary is. It is specifically a theatrical piece about a community’s relationship to justice, violence, and silence — the criminal himself is less the subject than what his decade of impunity reveals about rural poverty, legal dysfunction, and the limits of ordinary people’s patience. For audiences who want that conversation, this production is one of the more rigorous and formally impressive ways to have it in New York right now.
Lucille Lortel Theatre — The West Village Location
The Lucille Lortel Theatre is at 121 Christopher Street in the West Village — which means KENREX is playing in one of the more quietly atmospheric parts of lower Manhattan. Christopher Street has its own history and character, and arriving at the Lortel for a night of dark, propulsive theater feels different from arriving for the same show at a Midtown house. The West Village works with the show rather than against it.
The West Village has some of the strongest pre-show and post-show dining options in lower Manhattan — the blocks around Christopher Street, Bleecker Street, and the surrounding West Village streets offer good restaurants in every direction, in a neighborhood that has nothing to do with tourist theater infrastructure and everything to do with a neighborhood that has been feeding its own community for decades. The area is active well into the evening, and the subway options (the 1 train stops directly on Christopher Street; the A, C, and E at West 4th Street are a slightly longer walk) make it accessible from Midtown in approximately 15–20 minutes.
The show runs 2 hours 15 minutes with one intermission — a full evening. For a standard 7:30 or 8:00 PM curtain, dinner at 6:00–6:30 is comfortable timing. The pre-show dining guide covers timing strategy for longer shows with intermissions. The West Village neighborhood around the Lortel has strong casual and sit-down options within a short walk of the theater. After the show, the neighborhood supports late drinks or a post-show walk — the kind of evening activity that suits what KENREX is likely to have done to your mood: still thinking about it.
For visitors from Midtown hotels, the 1 train from 50th Street or 42nd Street stops directly at Christopher Street–Sheridan Square — about four stops south, under 15 minutes. The getting to a show in Manhattan guide covers routing details, and the hotels near Broadway guide covers Midtown options with solid downtown connections.
Is KENREX a Good First Off-Broadway Pick?
For the right first-timer — absolutely. If you are someone who finds true crime genuinely compelling, who wants to experience what live solo performance can do at its most virtuosic, or who wants an Off-Broadway night that feels nothing like a conventional evening at the theater — KENREX is a strong way to discover what this format can offer. The Lucille Lortel’s intimate scale means the performance reads at very close range, and that proximity to what Holden is doing is part of what makes the show work as powerfully as it does.
For first-timers who think “Off-Broadway” should mean lighter, cheaper, or more accessible than Broadway — this is a recalibration. KENREX is not easier or gentler than a Broadway show. It is darker and more demanding. For first-timers specifically looking for a comfortable introduction to Off-Broadway, see the Off-Broadway guide for a broader landscape, and the comparison section below. For how Off-Broadway differs from Broadway in general, the Broadway vs. Off-Broadway guide covers the distinction clearly.
Within the current Off-Broadway landscape, KENREX sits in a cluster of shows that reward specific, engaged audiences rather than general visitors. Other strong comparisons in the current season: Ulster American at Irish Rep is equally dark and verbally intense but structured very differently; Mexodus at Daryl Roth uses live looping in a way that shares KENREX’s live-music energy but serves a very different historical story; What Happened Was… at Minetta Lane is the furthest in the opposite direction — intimate and quiet rather than propulsive and dark. Any of them is a more specific choice than a default commercial Off-Broadway night, and any of them rewards the audience that chooses them for the right reasons.
Frequently Asked Questions
KENREX is a one-man theatrical piece based on the true story of Ken Rex McElroy — a predatory criminal who spent a decade terrorizing the small town of Skidmore, Missouri, while the justice system repeatedly failed to convict him. On July 10, 1981, he was shot dead in broad daylight in front of approximately 60 townspeople. No one came forward. The case remains officially unsolved. The play is about the decade that led to that moment, the legal failures that made it feel inevitable, and the community’s decision to hold its silence afterward. It is not a whodunit — the moral weight lies in what the story reveals about justice, community, and the conditions under which ordinary people reach a breaking point.
It is a play — specifically, a solo performance piece. There is no conventional musical structure of songs and story. What it has is a live score by John Patrick Elliott, who sits on stage and plays throughout the performance, providing a folk-Americana soundtrack that drives the narrative rather than decorating it. The distinction matters: KENREX is a theater piece with live music as a structural element, not a musical with songs and choreography. If you want a musical, this is not that night.
At the Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher Street, in the West Village. The nearest subway is the 1 train at Christopher Street–Sheridan Square, which puts you directly on Christopher Street. The A, C, and E trains at West 4th Street are also within walking distance. From Midtown, the 1 train southbound is approximately 15 minutes.
Approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, with one intermission. Plan dinner and evening logistics accordingly — for a 7:30 or 8:00 PM curtain, dinner at 6:00–6:30 is a comfortable target.
Not in the horror-movie sense, but it is genuinely unsettling. The show builds mounting pressure through the accumulation of McElroy’s crimes and the justice system’s failures, with a live score that amplifies that pressure. The content is dark — violence, abuse, institutional failure — and the production takes it seriously rather than treating it as entertainment. The more accurate word than “scary” is probably intense. It does not provide resolution in the conventional sense. Audiences who find the subject matter disturbing are likely right to: it is disturbing material, handled honestly.
Jack Holden, an Olivier Award-nominated British actor, performs all 35 characters in the production solo. Holden also co-wrote the piece with director Ed Stambollouian. John Patrick Elliott, who wrote the original score, performs it live on stage throughout the show. Stambollouian directs.
The official guidance is ages 12 and up, but the full content advisory — which includes depictions of violence, references to grooming, rape, and abuse — makes this a judgment call for parents and guardians rather than a blanket recommendation. For mature teenagers who are interested in theater and can engage with the moral complexity of the subject, the show is substantive and not gratuitous. For younger teens or those sensitive to violent or abusive content, the advisory is real and worth taking seriously.
The official content warnings include: haze, flashing lights, strobe lighting, loud noises, gunshot sound effects, depictions of physical violence and death, strong language, and references to grooming, rape, and sexual and physical abuse. These warnings reflect the real history the play is built from — McElroy’s crimes included child abuse, and the play does not omit that history. Anyone for whom these warnings are a concern should take them as accurate rather than precautionary.
Should You See KENREX?
KENREX is one of the most formally ambitious Off-Broadway shows currently running in New York, and one of the most demanding. It asks a lot of its performer — who delivers on that ask in a way that London critics unanimously described as exceptional — and it asks something of its audience too: the willingness to sit with moral complexity, to hold competing sympathies simultaneously, and to let a story build toward a conclusion that doesn’t offer the comfort of resolution.
For the audience it is built for — true-crime listeners who want theater rather than a podcast, theatergoers who find solo performance more exciting than a conventional ensemble, anyone who wants a night that leaves them still thinking on the subway home — KENREX is a strong choice through June 27, 2026. For visitors who want a broadly accessible, lighter, or warmer theater night, the content warnings and the subject matter make this genuinely the wrong show for that trip.
For tickets, check the official site. For a broader look at what else is running Off-Broadway right now, see the Off-Broadway guide. For planning the full evening around the Lucille Lortel, the pre-show dining guide and the getting there guide are the right starting points.