“The Lieutenant of Inishmore”
Love in their sightlines, Chris Pine is Padraic and Zoe Perry is Mairead in Martin McDonagh’s brutal play at the Taper. Photo by Craig Schwartz
This reviewer was skeptical from the start. “When I saw this play on Broadway I laughed harder than I thought possible,” notes Michael Ritchie, the Center Theatre Group’s artistic director. In the program for the current production of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” there’s also an article that sums up the history of violence, so to speak, as it’s been depicted on stage through the ages. However, it reads as a thinly-veiled self-justification in case what’s in store gets our hackles up. And for some viewers it will do just that.
Irish playwright Martin McDonagh burst into prominence during the late 1990s with such works as “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” The latter endeavor, coming to the Douglas Theatre next season, was memorably performed some 10 years back at the Geffen in Westwood.
With “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” written – I believe – in 1996 – and set in County Galway on the small island of Inishmore, McDonagh is being compared to filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. That’s because this is a very dark comedy and a play with its guns drawn; or, if you will, violence on steroids.
In the opening scene, an older man, Donny (Séan G. Griffin), and a long-haired teenage boy, Davey (Coby Getzig), are brooding over a dead cat on the kitchen table. It belongs to Padraic (Chris Pine), Donny’s son, who will be quite upset when he learns that Wee Thomas is doing a bit less than “poorly.”
I’m not sure if there’s something inherently funny in two men gazing at a lifeless animal, but clearly some audience members do. Well, Donny finally picks up the animal and parts of its brain or who-knows-what tumbles out. The humor, as such, must now be in our knowing that nothing good will come of this dire predicament.
The second scene finds Padraic – like I said, the cat’s owner – torturing a small-time drug dealer, James (Brett Ryback), who hangs from his heels, his legs bloodied as a result of Padraic having deprived him of a couple of toenails. He’s about to extract a nipple or two (some Monty Pythonish banter here) when the phone rings and Donny’s on the line, ineptly conveying the news that Wee Thomas is ailing.
Padraic hurls down the phone and rushes back home to see his beloved pet – which means more to him than life itself.
Cat people, so called, probably won’t care for this play, unless they’re sadists at heart, although – somewhat ironically – two of the characters are themselves fanatic in their love for these creatures. Ah, therein lies the rub.
Padraic runs into Mairead (Zoe Perry), a 16-year-old tomboy, the sister of Davey, and she’s sort of like an Ozarks hillbilly version of Annie Oakley, not forgetting that we’re in Ireland, of course, but at times it feels like we’re either in the Appalachians or in the Wild West.
Which leads to a general warning about the Irish dialect. It can be tricky, and not everyone will easily decipher what’s being said.
Mairead has her sexual gizmos coiled rather tight; she’s hot for Padraic, but naturally he’s preoccupied with his cat. Meanwhile, to avert or forestall the inevitable showdown, Donny and Davey have acquired an orange cat and are assiduously applying shoe polish so that it’ll look more like the coal-black Wee Thomas, now consigned to a burial mound somewhere outside. Finally, they finish this rather absurd and grimly funny makeover, and fall asleep. Padraic quietly enters and… Well, he’s not fooled for a minute.
What McDonagh has written is a blunt satire on Irish terrorism, its starting point being the various splinter groups from the Irish Republican Army, such as the Irish National Liberation Army, which in turn splintered into even more obscure, paramilitary organizations, each one claiming to be more patriotic than the next. In “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” this is underlined to some extent by the shadowy presence of three thugs (with infighting among themselves, naturally), played by Andrew Connolly, Kevin Keans, and Ian Alda. Yet another splinter group, of course. They have Padraic in their sights, or so they think.
As mentioned above, this is a play with its guns drawn, and it’s inevitable that those guns will go off with a vengeance. In keeping with the amped up storyline, the gunshots are extra loud, and the bloodbath is unlike anything you’ve ever seen or will see on stage. Despite the program notes having put us on high alert, a handful of audience members invariably leave.
Critics tend to praise McDonagh’s play for its tight structure, but it’s also clear that what the company is most proud of is its ability to conjure up a striking set of gruesome effects. One figures that the daily laundry bill adds considerably to the production expenses.
While it’s never mandatory to have at least one sympathetic character, it certainly helps, but no one here elicits our compassion. The closest person, actually, might be the guy who’s left hanging upside down. So, with unsavory characters and an impact that mostly relies on shocking the audience, I do have to wonder what exactly it is we’re laughing at? Are we laughing because laughter defuses the horrific?
What if the story was set closer to home and was more current? Just where is that fine line? After all, the violence that wracked Northern Ireland seems to have been eclipsed, and the various factions that bickered with one another are of no interest to most Americans in 2010. On the other hand, plays like “Stuff Happens” and “Homebody Kabul,” when they were staged at the Taper, seemed relevant and fresh and didn’t need dramatic shock and awe to make their point.
In the end, despite its fine cast, superb production values and so on, the play is troubling because it seems to harshly provoke a response rather than earn our approbation through more subtle displays of wit and emotion, immediacy and relevance. Instead, there’s something of a novelty factor hovering over it, creating whatever buzz it now has, which can only transcend its gore by becoming a comment on what is currently acceptable, on stage or otherwise, in our society. There is the suggestion that we have become desensitized to many things that at one time would have troubled us deeply to see depicted in this way. Perhaps this is one of the points that McDonagh is trying to make. Admittedly, there are some funny lines here, but what is being conveyed when wordplay and verbal humor offset what is visually repulsive? If one still believes that realistic depictions of torture and terror and graphic violence are no laughing matter, then this is one play to avoid.
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is up through Aug. 8 at the Mark Taper forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles in the Music Center. Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets, $20 to $65. Call (213) 628-2772 or go to CenterTheatreGroup.org. ER