Situational ethics and moral ambiguity take center stage in “KENREX,” the true crime thriller currently running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. On July 10, 1981, in Skidmore, Missouri (population 400), a town bully was shot to death in broad daylight. Sixty witnesses watched it happen. Not one would identify the killer. Jack Holden’s astonishing solo performance—playing prosecutor David Baird, Ken Rex McElroy, and thirty-three other characters—reconstructs how this small farming community reached its tipping point, grappling with what to do when the justice system repeatedly failed to stop a predator who held them and their families hostage for years. The question the show refuses to answer: Were they wrong?

The show unfolds as a 1984 FBI deposition: Federal Agent Annette Parker interviews Nodaway County Prosecutor David Baird about an unsolved murder that occurred three years earlier. The deposition begins as a recording—Kelly Burke voices Federal Agent Annette Parker, James Sobol Kelly voices David Baird—until Holden begins speaking Baird’s exact words along with the tape, mimicking every rise and fall, every pause, every stutter. As he continues, Baird’s recorded voice disappears and Holden takes over completely, pulling us into the story of Skidmore. On July 10, 1981, Ken Rex McElroy was shot to death in broad daylight in Skidmore, Missouri. Baird’s testimony reconstructs how the town reached that breaking point.

Ken Rex McElroy—mechanic, cattle rustler, arsonist, the town bully—had terrorized Skidmore for years. Indicted twenty-one times for crimes ranging from assault to theft, he was never convicted. His secret weapon: defense attorney Richard McFadin, whose courtroom wizardry combined constitutional expertise with witness intimidation (jurors found rattlesnakes in their mailboxes) to keep Ken perpetually free. When fourteen-year-old Trena McCloud sang the National Anthem at the town’s Punkin Show, Ken groomed her, got her pregnant, and married her to invoke spousal privilege—she could never testify against him. When her parents objected, their house mysteriously burned and the family dog was found shot on the lawn.

The breaking point came when Ken shot beloved grocer Bo Bowenkamp in the neck and left him for dead. Baird, newly appointed and idealistic, believed he could finally convict Ken by reducing the charge from attempted murder to second-degree assault—a strategic move to guarantee a win. It backfired. Ken made bail and used the freedom to escalate his terror: threatening the preacher, menacing Lois Bowenkamp, torching the town library, brandishing weapons at the D&G Tavern. When the bond hearing was postponed due to McFadin’s “scheduling conflict,” the town gathered—ostensibly to escort witness Ida Smith to the courthouse. Instead, they converged on the D&G parking lot as Ken and Trena sat in his Chevy Silverado. Gunshots rang out. Ken slumped dead. The witnesses scattered. Through three hundred hours of police interviews, Skidmore maintained a wall of silence. The case was closed with a settlement: Trena received seventeen thousand dollars. No one was ever charged.

Jack Holden plays 35 characters with astonishing ease during his two hours and fifteen minutes onstage, differentiating between them using only his voice and remarkable physicality. There are no costume changes—just the rolling up and down of short sleeves and the loosening and removal of a necktie. Holden captures the conflicts of both main and secondary characters in ways that leave the audience never confused about who is speaking or moving onstage. One character replaces another instantaneously: the earnest Prosecuting Attorney David Baird becomes the slick Defense Attorney Richard McFadin becomes the predatory town bully Ken Rex McElroy. Holden’s performance exhibits unmatched craft for a solo performer.

Holden’s embodiment of Ken Rex eerily reminds the audience of an offspring of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dr. Frankenstein’s lab assistant Igor. As he twists his body into Ken Rex, Holden makes it clear this is a menacing and dangerous outlaw. When Ken Rex is “replaced” by the fourteen-year-old Trena whom Ken Rex grooms and eventually marries so she cannot ever testify against him, the audience sees an innocent teenage girl morph into an equally menacing co-conspirator in Ken Rex’s crime spree.

Holden doesn’t reserve his craft for the main characters. He gives equal depth to every townsperson in the story—McElroy’s victims Lois and Bo Bowenkamp, the slick defense attorney McFadin, and Ken’s only “friend” Ida Smith who runs the D&G Tavern. Each plea for mercy, each attempt to calm the bully’s rage has a unique pitch, timbre, and physical bearing. When Lois confronts young Trena at the grocery store about her pregnancy, Holden shifts between maternal concern and judgmental reproach within seconds. When Bo stands up to Ken in the parking lot and is shot for his defiance, we see a good man’s fatal miscalculation. When Ida agrees to testify against Ken at the bond hearing—betraying her only friend to save her town—Holden captures the weight of that impossible choice.

Yorkshire, England composer, songwriter, and performer John Patrick Elliott is positioned upstage audience right, providing the musical heartbeat for the entirety of Holden’s performance. Elliott’s score ranges from driving country rock to plaintive Americana ballads, building each song live by layering guitar, drums, and vocals through loop pedals—creating a one-man band that swells from whisper to roar. Critics may describe “KENREX” as a solo show with musical accompaniment, but that undersells what’s happening onstage. This is two solo performers working in extraordinary counterpoint: Holden conjures an entire Missouri town while Elliott conjures an entire orchestra. When Elliott’s banshee wail punctuates Ken’s reign of terror, or when “Oh Shenandoah” rises as the town’s hymn of absolution, the music doesn’t underscore the action—it completes it. The show won two Olivier Awards in 2026: Holden for acting, and Giles Thomas for sound design that integrates Elliott’s live performance with the show’s visceral sonic landscape.

Director and co-writer Ed Stambollouian helms the creative team that supports Jack Holden and John Patrick Elliott, counterpointing their dynamic performances. Anisha Fields creates an open playing space that instantly morphs between the FBI deposition room, radio station, courtroom, B&B grocery store, D&G Tavern, Skidmore Christian Church, Nodaway High School bandstand, American Legion Hall, Punkin Show festival grounds, and the parking lot where Ken meets his end. What makes these transformations seamless is Joshua Pharo’s mood-driven lighting and video design working in tandem with Giles Thomas’s Olivier Award-winning sound design—both ranging from intimate whispers to ear-splitting terror.

Ed Stambollouian shapes the show with remarkable control over pacing and navigation of the narrative’s tonal shifts. Two scenes exemplify his craft. When Ken first meets fourteen-year-old Trena, she stands elevated, singing the Star-Spangled Banner in Holden’s clear soprano. As she notices Ken watching from below, Holden’s shadow continues the song while he himself is pulled downstage into Ken’s predatory gaze—a visual metaphor for the grooming that’s already begun. Later, before the shooting, Holden arranges several microphones in a circle onstage. He moves from mic to mic, speaking as different townspeople gathering in the parking lot. As he steps away from each microphone, it remains lit from above—a silent witness standing in for that person. After the gunshots, Holden methodically disconnects each microphone as the townspeople flee, erasing the evidence one voice at a time. Both scenes are devastatingly effective, transforming theatrical necessity into moral commentary.

At its core, “KENREX” confronts an impossible moral equation: Ken Rex McElroy was a predator who terrorized Skidmore for years, grooming and marrying a 14-year-old, shooting neighbors, burning homes, and holding an entire community hostage through fear. He deserved to be stopped. And yet—sixty people gathered in a parking lot and shot him to death in broad daylight, then maintained a wall of silence through three hundred hours of police interviews. They committed premeditated murder. Both things are true, and the show refuses to let us choose which truth matters more.

The production’s genius lies in making us understand why the town reached its breaking point. When Prosecutor David Baird reduces the attempted murder charge to second-degree assault—a strategic move to guarantee conviction—he doesn’t anticipate Ken will use his bail period to escalate the terror. The judge postpones the bond hearing. The system that was supposed to protect Skidmore collapses again. And in that moment of institutional failure, what are people morally obligated to do? Wait indefinitely while neighbors are shot and homes are burned? Or take justice into their own hands and become what they claim to oppose?

The show’s moral fulcrum is Trena, Ken’s teenage widow. The community tells itself they saved her by killing her groomer and abuser. But as Trena points out in her devastating final speech, no one asked if she wanted to be saved this way. They let Ken groom her when she was fourteen—hoping, as one character admits, that marriage “would keep him quiet.” They never protected her as a child. They murdered her husband in front of her. They burned her out of town when she didn’t thank them. They gave her seventeen thousand dollars and called it closure. Trena’s accusation cuts to the bone: “You think you banished your monster. Well y’all should take a look in the mirror sometime.”

The show asks questions it cannot answer: When institutions fail completely, what are people to do? Is there a meaningful difference between justice and vengeance when the outcome is the same? Who bears responsibility when everyone is complicit—the town that killed him, the system that couldn’t stop him, the lawyer who enabled him, the prosecutor who tried and failed? Can a community ever be clean after purchasing safety through collective violence?

These aren’t abstract theological exercises. They’re questions about how we live together when the structures meant to protect us collapse. Federal Agent Parker tells Baird that compared to the people of Skidmore, “we’re better off—yes, we have to live without knowing, but they have to live with knowing. For the rest of their lives.” The show suggests that moral certainty is a luxury reserved for those who’ve never had to choose between waiting for a justice system that will never come and taking matters into their own hands. It doesn’t excuse what Skidmore did. But it refuses to let us condemn them from a safe distance either.

“KENREX” is essential theater—a tour de force of performance, direction, and moral inquiry that refuses easy answers. Jack Holden’s astonishing portrayal of thirty-five characters is matched only by the show’s unflinching examination of what happens when the social contract between citizens and the state collapses entirely. This is not merely a true crime thriller, though it functions brilliantly as one. It’s a meditation on collective guilt, institutional failure, and the impossible choices communities face when the law cannot—or will not—protect them.

The production’s relevance to contemporary concerns is impossible to ignore. At a moment when trust in the judicial system has reached historic lows and vigilante justice resurfaces with alarming frequency, “KENREX” asks us to consider what we would do in Skidmore’s place. The show doesn’t condone what the town did. But it makes us understand why they did it—and that understanding is deeply uncomfortable. When Parker asks Baird, “You’re telling me you wouldn’t have been in the parking lot that day?” the question extends to the audience. We’re forced to reckon with our own certainties about justice, law, and violence.

This is a must-see for anyone who cares about theater’s capacity to challenge moral complacency. Holden and Elliott deliver performances that will be discussed for years. Stambollouian’s direction transforms theatrical minimalism into visceral experience. And the questions the show raises—about who deserves protection, who has the right to take a life, and whether a community can ever be clean after purchasing safety through murder—are questions we cannot afford to ignore.