Displaying items by tag: Martin McDonagh

Kids these days…

I went into opening night of Gift Theatre’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman only knowing that my 16-year-old daughter was excited to be my date. “It’s dark, Dad,” she warned me. Boy, was she right. “But it’s amazing, Dad,” she also assured me. And boy, was she even righter on that count.

So, dark and amazing. The Pillowman is both of these. But what is it?

A buddy cop piece. A murder mystery. The touching tale of two brothers, each all the other has in the world. A warning from some dystopian dictatorship. A volume of grim, gruesome fairy tales. The Pillowman is all of these things, and more. Much more.

I haven’t enjoyed a play this much since Goodman’s Jeff-winning 2018 production of The Wolves. And that’s because — along with McDonagh’s masterful book, Laura Alcala Baker’s visionary direction, and Lauren Nichols and Courtney Winkelman’s dark, stark scenery, of course — the four actors who tell The Pillowman’s story (and its stories within the story) give what’s a pretty soulless premise a whole lot of soul. The four-person cast is The Pillowman’s beating, battered, bleeding, bloody heart.

A word of warning. This play is dark. And shocking. And violent. It’s about child murders. And even worse, childhood trauma. But even more shocking is, coming from the mouths of a couple of the characters, a word I’d figured was too taboo to have to hear in today’s world. The R Word. Of course, its use speaks volumes about the characters who use it. Even as it’s used to describe Jay Worthington’s Michal, a developmentally disabled fellow. Worthington, to his credit, plays Michal with incredible restraint and empathy, never using the character’s condition and lot in life for laughs. Whether climbing the walls or crawling the floor, whether admitting to the unthinkable or revealing unthinkable trauma, Worthington’s Michal draws the eye whenever he’s onstage — an incredible character, but just as incredible a performance.

Michal’s brother Katurian, the play’s main character, is a storyteller and tells this story to us, the audience. Tucked away in some future police interrogation room for the duration of the play, Katurian begins the show with a bag over his head, as in the dark as his audience — us — is. Martel Mannin’s face and expressions do the same heavy lifting that Michal’s physicality do, manufacturing suspense, shock, and sorrow — a lifetime of sorrow. And, along with inventive ways of illustrating Katurian’s twisted children’s tales, Mannin’s face and voice keep the audience enraptured as he tells one story after another, each designed again to suspend belief, to shock sensibilities, and to create a world of sorrow.

In Katurian’s world, his cement holding cell, we also meet the two cops investigating a series of incidents seemingly copied straight from the pages of the fictional storyteller’s fictional stories. Gregory Fenner’s Ariel comes off at first as the prototype “bad cop” (I think one of the two even identifies him as such), threatening (and carrying out) acts of brutality, puffing on a vape, and stalking the concrete cube that is the play’s entire world. But look closer and it’s Fenner’s eyes that tell deeper stories that come to the fore as the play progresses. In Ariel’s eyes, ferocity morphs into fear.

But in a cast where each member could lay claim to being the MVP, my award goes to Cyd Blakewell. Her role, Detective Tupolski — it seems both from the play’s unchanged dialogue and a bit of internet perusing I did after the house lights came on — was written for a man. (Jeff Goldblum played the role in New York.) This is a physical (and violent) play, and Blakewell’s easy and subtle physicality looms throughout, even as others are applying electrodes and murdering children and climbing and crawling and crying and creating dark imaginary worlds, as she just pretends at being the “good cop.” (Full disclosure: when Blakewell first started her bit, my daughter turned to me and said, “It’s mom!” at the same time I turned to her and said “It’s your mom!” so maybe her performance hit close to home.) And it’s the story that Blakewell’s Tupolski tells near the end, using just a blackboard and a piece of white chalk, that was for me the best scene in a play full of contenders.

So if you’re up for a very dark evening of entertainment, you’ll be entertained. And if you can get past some pretty unsettling content in order to admire acting and storytelling at its finest, The Gift Theatre’s The Pillowman is for you, now through March 29.

Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West brings us Coleman and Valene Connor, two brothers fighting continuously over issues large and small: which brand of potato chips is better, who of the two do girls find more attractive, and who really owns their house.

As the play opens, Coleman (Robert Tobin), the older brother is at the table with the village priest, Father Welsh (Mark Tacderas), who is wheedling for a glass of poitin – the illegal local hooch brewed from potatoes. The two discuss a funeral held that day, Coleman complaining to the priest about the lack of refreshments. 

“If I held the purse strings” there would have been food and drink, Coleman says. That complaint pales in contrast, or perhaps increases in significance, as we learn that it was Coleman's own father who was buried today. His lack of engagement with the loss of his parent, however, is our first signal that something is amiss. And somehow, it becomes slightly understandable, as we learn that Coleman has killed his father with a shotgun.

Father Welsh, who is also very thirsty for his poitin, handily provides the audience some exposition in this scene - recounting aloud to Coleman how fortunate he is that a witness saw him trip, providing an alibi that described the shooting as completely accidental.

Soon enough Valene enters the cottage,and the two go at each other, attacking each others' emotional vulnerabilities, and battling physical as well. Father Welsh is forced to intervene to stop them, reminding them of the solemnity of the occasion - about which neither brother seems to care. We also see that Valene has marked items around the house with his initials - V  -and we learn by and by that he has used his father’s death and Coleman's emotional state, to seize ownership of all the property from his sibling. How this happened is the crux of the drama, and we will avoid spoiling that.

Let it be said, though, that this worsens what is clearly a very bad dynamic between the brothers since their early years. Now Coleman must beg, borrow and mostly steal to wrest his sustenance from his younger brother. How this happened is a key to the intrigue of the play, and as it is revealed, we witness Martin McDonagh’s signature touch in a slow, unfolding of the plot. In all McDonagh’s works, we see a gradual reveal of the story, as he peels the onion – shocking and surprising us as the action advances. 

For the dramatic action, McDonagh’s characters are not merely arguing vehemently.  Colin and Valene are at each other’s throats, and private parts, with knifes, guns and fists. It becomes apparent that their father kept the two young men from killing each other, thus far.

Years of childhood enmity repressed by Dad come roaring to the surface, like a volcano erupting. With him gone, we watch in ensuing scenes as Coleman and Valene come perilously close to mutual injury and possibly murder. 

All the pummeling draws Father Welsh to intervene several times in the course of the play – stepping into the role Dad must have held. But this priest is a fragile figure, and he soon despairs of ever straightening out the boys, or anyone in his benighted parish.

“I thought Leenane was a nice place when I turned up here,” he confides to Girleen Kelleher (Phoebe Moore). “But then I find out it’s a murder capital.” Unfortunately for Father Welsh, Kelleher is a sadistic blackguard who taunts the suffering priest mercilessly, driving him further to despair. She also happens to be the local purveyor of poitin, on which Father Welsh is very dependent.

The brothers are chastened by Father Welsh after another neighbor commits suicide, and the two make efforts to mend their ways and to get along. But the deeper patterns of emotional dysfunction rise to the fore, and things go from bad to worse.

I won't reveal more of the story; go see this play. The performances by the cast are very strong.  The black humor of The Lonesome West is also part of its attraction, as well as the gradual unfolding of the plot. In his recent star turn, Three Billboards Outside Billings, Missouri we see how far McDonagh's mastery has progressed. This earlier work is a little less smooth, but is still a strong, if shorter, pleasure. 

The current production excels in physical performance, and this show is very physical. But it is somewhat hampered by the challenge of capturing the lilt of McDonagh's Irish English - the cast is consistent in their reach for the script's accent, but the language (and meaning) is lost at times to pace and cadence. Nevertheless, most of it comes through, and the underlying performances are uniformly good. 

The Lonesome West is directed by Dana Anderson and produced by AstonRep Theatre Company. It runs through November 18 at The Raven Theatre in Chicago. 

Martin McDonagh has lately become even more widely known for his screenplays, and is among those select writers whose byline can draw ticket sales. (He wrote and directed In Bruges with Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes; and Seven Psychopaths with Farrell, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell. His star rocketed with highly acclaimed Three Billboards Outside Billings, Missouri, which he wrote for Frances McDormand and which garnered two Oscars and won Golden Globe Awards. 

But before all that McDonagh was writing plays in Ireland in his native Irish English (he was born in England of Irish parents), set in Western Ireland, with titles like A Skull in Connemara, The Cripple of Inishmaan, and The Banshees of Inisheer, all towns in the vicinity of Galway and the Aran Islands.

The Lonesome West (1997) is the third in McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy, perhaps the most famous being The Beauty Queen of Leenane (a Tony nominee for Best Play 1998). He set the very successful Pillowman outside Ireland, and A Behanding in Spokanee was his first set in the U.S.  All this by way of saying, do not miss an opportunity to see a Martin McDonagh work played live and well on stage in Chicago.