‘The Menendez Murders,’ Season 1, Episode 4

Let’s talk about acting. Admittedly, that’s not always the safest bet for opening a discussion of a “Law & Order” episode. But the notion of acting has become a central motif in this case. Indeed, motif is the apt word, originating, as it does, in the French word for motive: “All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare put it, and if everyone is acting, then everyone has hidden motives. Determine the motive, decode the act.

That’s particularly important when the act is killing.

In any other TV recap, slipping a Shakespeare reference into the lead would be grounds for dismissal. (Editor’s note — he came close.) I blame Erik Menendez, whom we see reciting Shakespeare in one of this week’s flashbacks. Erik talked about his passion for acting last week; it was a passion his father, José, squashed like so much else in his sons. We got some fairly predictable and superficial insights last week into what acting was for him as an abused child — an escape, a way to be someone else — and I first assumed this detail was a somewhat hacky attempt at character building. But the fact that we return to it might speak to something more fundamental about how we’re supposed to understand Erik’s character and understand this case. Could it be that Erik’s character is actually a character?

Leslie Abramson believes instinctively that the boys were abused. But she knows that instinct doesn’t win cases: Not every abused boy kills his parents, let alone in such brutal fashion, and we still haven’t determined why Kitty was killed. Now Leslie’s talking to Erik’s former drama teacher at Beverly Hills High, looking for insight, for a motive behind the violent performance. Erik was no Olivier, the teacher says, but in terms of commitment and enthusiasm “he was a star.” He visibly expressed frustrations through his acting, she says, recalling a soliloquy he once recited from “Richard II”:

Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot

Unlikely wonders — how these vain weak nails

May tear a passage through the flinty ribs

Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,

And for they cannot, die in their own pride.

Here, as in Erik’s screenplay, we’re getting insight into long-simmering internal conflict and violence. He admires his father and wants to kill him. But as important, we’re learning that he’s a convincing actor. I believe this is meant in part to cast doubt on our early impressions. Should we trust his tears? His story?

Erik was also dyslexic, we learn, a fact his parents tried to hide. An interview with Kitty’s former therapist reveals that Kitty was guarding “sick secrets” that she never explained. It also reveals how cold Kitty was toward her sons’ suffering. Later, Lyle reveals a bit more about why. She wasn’t only in denial about José’s behavior, acting out at her sons in jealousy. She also was in on the sexual abuse, Lyle says, forcing him to climb into bed with her and “touch her” when he was 11.