REVIEWS ...
Monday, August 13, 2007
Martin McDonagh tells another summer story at GableStage, this one both bloody and funny.
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
By the time The Lieutenant of Inishmore reaches the "Oh, no" point of its final moments, the rustic-minimalist Irish cottage onstage has been redecorated with human blood, dead bodies and littered kitties.
Doesn't sound much like a laugh riot, does it?
Yet with a craftsman's skills and an absurdist's point of view, playwright Martin McDonagh has created just that: a riotous farce about mindless, ludicrous violence.
McDonagh's hilarious Grand Guignol of a play has just opened at GableStage, where last summer's production of McDonagh's The Pillowman earned the company and director Joseph Adler Carbonell Awards for theatrical excellence. Inishmore is every bit the equal of The Pillowman; even better, if you're talking a collection of great performances.
In the tradition of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill, The Lieutenant of Inishmore does violence with a smirk, using it as a way to comment on society, on hypocrisy, on a world in which the line between restraint and mayhem seems to grow ever more tenuous.
Yet none of McDonagh's serious themes plays out in a weighty way in Inishmore. He is, first and foremost, a grand storyteller. And in this, his funniest play, he spins quite the yarn.
Not so much a shaggy dog story as a mangled cat tale, Inishmore begins with Donny (Ken Clement) and Davey (Erik Fabregat) contemplating the bloodied remains of the cat formerly known as Wee Thomas. The feline victim, apparently run over in the road (but not, Davey insists, by him), is missing chunks of his brain. The two men fear that theirs will soon be in a similar state, should Donny's crazy terrorist son Padraic (Todd Allen Durkin) find out what has happened to the creature he loved most in the world.
A less-than-honest version of the news does get to him, a lucky break for the drug dealer (Paul Homza) he's in the midst of torturing. But before Padraic arrives back at Donny's, other terrorism-inclined characters show up.
There's one-eyed Christy (Stephen G. Anthony) and his dim henchmen, Brendan (Scott Genn) and Joey (Daniel Gomez). Davey's 16-year-old sister Mairead (Kim Morgan), a terrorist wannabe who sharpened her shooting skills on bovine targets, lurks about too, resuming her mad crush on Padraic.
Once he is home, the madness escalates, in comically gruesome ways it would be unfair to reveal. Let's just say there aren't many still healthy by the time the play ends.
Adler's creative team -- particularly Lyle Baskin, responsible for the Irish-evocative set; Jeff Quinn, whose lighting so effectively shifts mood and location; Matt Corey, whose music and sound design suggest a Tarantino homage; and Waldo Warshaw, master of exploding-on-demand bloodiness -- has artfully met the numerous technical challenges of the play.
The acting is as good as it gets in South Florida, which these days is excellent indeed. That said, an extra round of praise goes to Durkin, who can move from rage to desolation in an instant; Morgan, who makes Mairead the dangerous groupie to Padraic's rock-star terrorist; Anthony, who brings a killer-cool charisma to Christy; and Fabregat, whose comic arsenal is both subtle and lethal.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Gory Inishmore is gruesomely funny and pointed
By Jack Zink
In every great feud, the moral imperative becomes entwined with the thrill of the kill. So it is in Martin McDonagh's gruesomely funny The Lieutenant of Inishmore, whose victims lie bleeding all over the posh Biltmore Hotel's annex.
McDonagh is to terrorism what Jonathan Swift was to mere tyranny back in what was apparently a kinder, gentler world of protest. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is rooted in the most recent Irish political and religious insurgence, but in its horrific simplicity it becomes a global warning. Holocaust, anyone? Let's start at your household.
The GableStage theater company, housed in the Biltmore, led the most recent Carbonell Awards with last summer's production of The Pillowman, another of McDonagh's creepy treatises on the death of society. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is far more graphic in its bloodthirsty details. It's a theatrical grand guignol derived in part from the playwright's careful absorption of the cine1massacre genre that gave us Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers.
GableStage director Joseph Adler makes McDonagh's brand of splatter tragicomedy especially effective in the confines of his petite regional theater. Here, the action is alive in every sense of the word and the special effects are provided by Waldo Warshaw, the same expert on mayhem who created the bloodbath for Inishmore on Broadway.
Couple that with several actors from South Florida's top echelon and splashy newcomer Kim Morgan, whose debut in Smut earlier this summer won special attention. The ensemble works a calculated game of threat and counterthreat, building through a teasing but deceptively tame first act before exploding in comic gore all over Lyle Baskin's scenery and Ellis Tillman's costumes, denoting among other things a spiritual squalor on the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway. The dour atmosphere is further enhanced by Matt Corey's sound design and Jeff Quinn's lighting.
Local theatergoers know Todd Allen Durkin can play nice guy. We've seen him do it, but rarely. It's obvious from the get-go that the title role of Padraic, the half-crazed Irish terrorist, is tailor-made to Durkin's manic stereotype.
Padraic is a self-styled terrorist revolutionary too mad for the IRA's liking, so he's joined a splinter group. While he's away on the mainland torturing a schoolyard drug dealer (Paul Homza), his beloved black cat, Wee Joseph, is dying a gruesome death, his brains dripping onto the dining table. It was an accident, says long-haired and slow-witted teen neighbor Davey (Erik Fabregat). But Donny (Ken Clement), Padraic's father, suspects worse, and fears that when he gives his son the news, Padraic will hightail it back home and kill them both.
Meanwhile, Davey's tomboyish younger sister Mairead (Morgan) practices for a career of patriotism by shooting the eyes out of cows with a Daisy BB rifle. And who are those three strangers hanging in the byways, led by Stephen G. Anthony as a one-eyed menace?
The Lieutenant of Inishmore was to premiere in England in 2001 but was derailed by the events of 9-11. Two years later, its premiere won the Olivier Award, London's version of the Tony, and after more time for scars to heal in New York, it opened to high praise in 2006.
Behind the veneer of farce, McDonagh's play is a disquieting allegory, told with cutting-edge economy, for the easy rationales behind the passionate convictions that spawn terrorism everywhere. The GableStage's top-flight creation guarantees that the message is not lost.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
Wednesday, August 13, 2007
'Lieutenant of Inishmore' is black Irish comedy at its best
By Hap Erstein, Palm Beach Post Theater Writer
Sure, Medea murdered her own children, and Oedipus Rex gouged out his eyes, but for wall-to-wall onstage gore, it is hard to beat Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore.
Brains get splattered, men are blinded by bullets, corpses are sawed into pieces for ease of disposal, and cats are mutilated left and right. Oh, and did I mention that the play is a laugh-out-loud comedy?
One day soon, the terrorist comedy may be a crowded genre of its own, but for the moment, Ireland's master of mayhem McDonagh seems to have the field to himself.
The play opened in New York last year but failed to find a sufficiently appreciative audience - or perhaps one with a strong enough collective stomach. Still, you could be repelled by the violence and still be favorably impressed by the author's pistol-whip wit.
Certainly, he has worthy co-conspirators in director Joseph Adler and his bloody good GableStage cast. Adler struck Carbonell Award gold this year with McDonagh's The Pillowman, a considerably more subtle and chilling exhibition of grisly theatrics. But Adler is more than ready to lay on the stage blood, and he certainly has the actors to portray these thick-skulled Irish hooligans with a deadpan comic spin.
It is unthinkable that this Lieutenant of Inishmore will not be vying for top honors at the end of this season. Too bad there is not a category for best projectile blood squibs.
This is a play about warring Irish Republican Army splinter groups, vigilante punishment of drug dealers and gang rivalries. But first and foremost, it is a play about a pussycat.
As The Lieutenant of Inishmore begins, a black cat named Wee Thomas lies dead, fresh from a losing collision with a bicycle. That would be bad enough, but the cat was the best friend of crazed Padraic (an intensely unhinged, yet feline sentimental Todd Allen Durkin). Having left the pet cat in the care of his dad, Donny (Ken Clement), and a bloke named Davey (Erik Fabregat) - an Irish version of Dumb and Dumber - to go off and bomb some fish-and-chip shops, Padraic is bound to explode in volcanic anger if he learns his cat is a goner.
It is the central joke of the play that people can be blown to bits and no one much cares. But harm a cat - and be forewarned, a few do get mortally maimed in the course of the evening - and terrorists and audience members alike are shaken to the core.
Unable to find a suitable substitute black cat, Davey settles for an orange tabby and proceeds to cover it with black shoe polish. Meanwhile, Davey's teenage terrorist wannabe sister, Mairead (feisty Kim Morgan), is causing havoc with an air rifle and pining away for Padraic. He is also in the sights of a one-eyed rival rebel (Stephen G. Anthony) and two pistol-toting underlings with itchy trigger fingers.
The blood and the laughs flow voluminously in the second act. It is not the play's fault that we start wondering who cleans up this mess between performances and what GableStage's laundry and blood stain removal bill will be by the end of the four-week run.
The action takes place primarily on a detail-rich humble Irish cottage designed by Lyle Baskin, with aptly melodramatic lighting by Jeff Quinn.
All of the production elements are up to GableStage's high standards, particularly Waldo Warshaw's patent-pending bloody bullet hits.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Good Cop, Mad Cop
Violence, politics, and Irish kitten killers in Coral Gables
By Brandon K. Thorp
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a lighthearted political satire prominently featuring four murders, two toenail-pullings, one near-miss nipple amputation, two cats' brains, six punctured eyeballs, many severed limbs, and something like nine gallons of blood. It is a Grand Guignol explosion of death, violence, and bodily fluids that fuses big laughs with big-picture politicking. There are moments during its onstage detonation when it is unclear whether we should think, laugh, or gag.
This is the kind of happy confusion GableStage exists to create: comedy that is drama, jokes that are statements, brutality that is charming. Which means playwright Martin McDonagh is something like a gift to GableStage's executive artistic director, Joe Adler. Just like Joe, McDonagh is smart, sick, and funny, all heart and entrails. Counting Lieutenant, both of GableStage's best productions from the past year have been McDonagh gigs. The other, The Pillowman, was a dark tale set in an unspecified police state in which a writer is brutally tortured because the child murders depicted in his stories have begun taking place in the real world. There were shades of history in that piece - of the imprisonment of the Marquis de Sade, of Oscar Wilde's courtroom defense of The Picture of Dorian Gray - but its central questions were abstract, dealing with brotherly love, sacrifice, and art. The Lieutenant's concerns are more grounded in the real world, even while the play itself is vastly more absurd.
The grisly chain reaction of violence and murder in The Lieutenant is set off by the death of a pet on a lonely road somewhere in the Aran Islands on an unspecified date in 1993. In the opening scene, Erik Fabregat's long-haired, terminally befuddled teenage Davey and Ken Clement's loutish Donny are staring in terror at a dead black cat lying on a kitchen table. Davey insists the cat was dead, just lying there in the street with its brains oozing out, when he found it. Donny would prefer to believe Davey killed the cat. He wants someone to pin the death on, and with good reason. The cat belongs to Donny's son, Padraic (Todd Allen Durkin), a terrorist so violent and bloodthirsty that the IRA wouldn't take him. Padraic cares about only two things: a free Ireland and his kitty, Wee Thomas. Of course, tending to one necessitates ignoring the other, which is why he has entrusted Donny, his pa, with the cat's well-being while he's off bombing chip shops. Donny knows that unless something very weird happens, Wee Thomas's sudden squishing will spell doom for all involved.
Donny decides not to deliver the bad news all at once. He contacts Padraic on his cell phone and informs him Wee Thomas is looking, well, poor. Padraic, who is at that moment torturing a petty drug dealer he has suspended from the ceiling (Paul Homza, looking appropriately nervous), goes all to pieces. He frees his quarry and promises to rush home immediately on the very first ferry.
Anybody who has been watching Durkin's remarkable string of manic performances over the past year will quickly get the feeling this part was written especially for him. It wasn't, but that doesn't matter. Few actors in the history of the trade could toggle ideology-fueled bloodlust and boneless, face-crumpling grief with such facility, or have so much fun doing it. When he storms into Donny's house the next morning, only to discover a living orange cat that Davey and Donny have covered in black shoe polish in an inane attempt to replace Wee Thomas, Durkin springs into sudden violence with terrible glee on his face - precisely the expression one would hope to see on someone who could be driven to multiple homicide by the death of a pet. A great deal of The Lieutenant's fun factor is found in the anticipation of awful carnage, and in knowing that it will come courtesy of someone so flagrantly, loudly deranged as Mr. Durkin.
Despite these ominous beginnings, things don't work out the way one would expect. There is carnage aplenty, but it sneaks up from weird angles, and this is where one can feel the churning force of McDonagh's mutant intelligence. Wee Thomas's death, we learn, was a political killing - an attempt to get Padraic to lower his guard. It seems there is internecine war among the members of the Irish National Liberation Army, and Wee Thomas was but a pawn in their game. The INLA thugs, played by Stephen G. Anthony, Scott Genn, and Daniel Gomez, are nearly as mean as Padraic. So is little Davey's kid sister, Mairead (Kim Morgan), a spunky, punky 16-year-old with stars and clover in her eyes and a vicious aim with an air rifle.
When these people come together in Donny's little house, they trade a great deal of revolutionary blather before proceeding to blow each other's brains out. It's interesting to note how little any of it has to do with the English, or with economics or religion or anything one would expect James Connolly's spiritual descendents to discuss. These rebels are disorganized; they nitpick about animal rights and splinter groups splintering off of splinter groups, and about whether petty drug dealers have any place in postliberation Ireland. The story's two unarmed characters, Donny and Davey, are the stand-ins for the nonpolitical working people of the country, eternally bullied and cowed by the ideologues allegedly fighting on their behalf.
The fun and affection with which all of this is written and performed means GableStage's Lieutenant is, above all else, a love letter to Ireland. The fact that everyone in the play is either a bully or a sheep is an indictment. No matter how much he loves his parents' country, McDonagh has his gripes, and he knows how to voice them.
There is a moment near the end of the play when two survivors of the last act's gratuitous slaughter, surrounded by dismembered corpses and reduced to taking orders from a gun-toting 16-year-old girl, witness a healthy cat wander into the room. The two men begin talking quietly about all the trouble felines have caused them of late, and quickly decide this cat deserves to die. When the men declare their intention to kill it, it is very nearly the point of the whole show - a dumb and brutal reaction against powerlessness precisely like all the other explosions of dumb brutality to splatter the stage over the previous two hours. It is a clear distillation of the mindset McDonagh must see at the heart of much of Ireland's grief over the years, and everybody else's too.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
By Jeremiah Tash
1993. North Ireland is mired in a protracted freedom fight divisively pitting Protestantism against Catholicism. The Irish National Liberation Army (Catholics) has yet to call for a ceasefire (that happened in 1998) against the factious Loyalist Volunteer Force-the INLA's Protestant doppelganger. The small agrarian island of Inishmore serves as the backdrop for the play, which is intriguing because Inishmore is the largest of the Central-East coast Galway Islands and geographically distance from Belfast.
The play opens on Donny and Davey, two blundering Emerald Isle hayseeds, getting animated over Davey's accidental (or was it malicious?) killing of Lieutenant Padriac's beloved cat and "only friend," Wee Thomas. When Davey learns the cat is owned by Padriac-Donny's son and one of the INLA's most sadistic soldiers-he understandably fears for his life. The immediate scene graphically illustrates Padriac's M.O. as he cuts off two toenails of a drug dealer and threatens to lop off his less-favored nipple (humanly pardoning the favored nip). Padriac's no puppy-dog. He's a grizzled, gun-toting, blood-lusting, militant freedom fighter. So what's the deal with his Freddie Mercury-like obsession with cats? Is this guy for real?
To understand Padriac's unabashed obsession with his little black cat, Wee Thomas, and comprehend how a play about avenging a feline murder could possibly be simultaneously hilarious and weighty, it's beneficial to know Ireland's historical pattern of unrest and in-fighting within rival factions over the past centuries. Since a play review isn't the ideal forum for a summation of Ireland's tumultuous political and religious history in relation to the play's context, suffice it to say the play takes place in Ireland for a reason. Other possible settings include the Middle East (Israel, Iraq, et al.) and Americans may not be composed enough to openly laugh at, say, Sunni's blowing up cats with landmines.
The play's impetus occurs when Padriac divulges his intentions to leave the INLA and form his own splinter cell, "a splinter cell from a splinter cell...that's perfect," he says. It turns out poor witless Davey wasn't responsive for Wee Thomas's death: Padriac's former INLA cronies "cat-brained" poor little Wee Thomas knowing Padriac would return home and avail a perfect opportunity to kill him. Lucky for Padriac, Mairead, 16 year-old militant boyish farm-girl with a Gaelic bull-dyke haircut, overhears the would-be assassins plot to eliminate their Lieutenant. Mairead's masculine deportment and coiffure obscure her sexuality, providing a host of androgynous jokes and, more importantly, plot-hooks. The only lesbian-related knock on Mairead, if you're attracted to young butch-y militant types, is the fact she is infatuated Padriac (a man) and his power to allow her (a girl) into the INLA. As the play progresses, Mairead quietly asserts herself as the pivotal character. Davey uses her cat, Sir Robert, as a surrogate for Wee Thomas, but Padriac recognizes the imposter and some cat-braining of his own-leading to a showdown between Padriac, Davey and Donny, the INLA goons, and Mairead. The final question: loyalty or idealism? Go see the play and find out which wins.
Another reason to go see this play is the fact it is fantastic. I'm not sure how much simpler to say it. The only disclaimer I give is the gunshots are loud and the cat-braining (not to live cats, so no need to call the ASPCA) is graphic. The special effects are surprisingly realistic; splattered blood a powerful visual metaphor for the allegorical blinding senselessness of violence. All the actors turn in stirring, on-point performances, resulting in a thoroughly impressive piece of theatre.
The poster for this production tells you to "think Monty Python meets Quentin Tarantino," but that's bollocks: neither Python nor Tarantino delve into political allegory with McDonagh's verve and fearlessness. It's its own bloody feckin' ting - and that's a damn good feckin' ting.
