Humor An Antidote To Depressing Theme
“The Cripple of Inishmaan” Saturday, Jan. 29, Spokane Civic Theatre’s
Firth Chew Studio Theatre
The formula becomes clear in this, the second Martin McDonagh play to open in Spokane over the weekend: Take some sad, rural Irish characters, put a lot of cruel and heartless dialogue in their mouths, throw in a few surprising plot twists and watch the audience squirm.
And watch the audience laugh, too. As mean and downright sadistic as McDonagh can be at times, his plays work diabolically well as vicious black humor.
Did I say vicious? Well, what else can you call a play that begins with people making fun of a crippled boy (Cripple Billy) and climaxes when one of the softer-hearted characters beats the crippled boy to a pulp?
Yet, in a reminder that McDonagh is not so easily pigeonholed, the play ends with a tender act of kindness toward Cripple Billy.
The plot is uncomplicated: The insular inhabitants of the island of Inishmaan get excited about a Hollywood crew filming “The Man of Aran” on a nearby island. They see this as the ticket off their boring island, and even Cripple Billy dreams of stardom. This framework is an excuse to get to know nine of the villagers and learn all of the gossip surrounding them.
This Studio Theatre production manages to squeeze plenty of laughter out of what is essentially an ode to human meanness and stupidity. McDonagh, 29, is not one of those lyrical and poetic Irish playwrights. He’s a crass London playwright who probably could get a job writing scripts for “South Park” if he had a mind to. That’s a comment on both his crudeness and his pointed wit.
Director Jack Delehanty has done a good job of keeping the tone just light enough to allow us to laugh. In a play like this, you don’t want to go too far toward the comedic and turn it into a bizarre series of gags. Nor do you want to play it too heavily and throw the audience into depression over the sorry state of the human race.
He has assembled a fine cast of 1934 village eccentrics. Among the best are Stuart McKenzie, who reveals a soft heart beneath a gruff exterior (or does he?) as Babbybobby. Brad Picard was nicely obnoxious as the annoying village busybody Johnnypateenmike. Sarah Keller and Susan Creed were almost lovable (if you can use that word for any McDonagh character) as Cripple Billy’s two aunts.
Bil Childress is funny and endearing as the put-upon young man Bartley, who ends up with egg, literally, on his face.
I especially liked Meghan Wittman as the breathtakingly mean young Helen, who delights in torturing cats, geese and humans. She is brazen and vulnerable, all at once.
Joe Mazzie, a University High School student, makes a sympathetic Cripple Billy, with a fine feel for the character’s sadness, depth and demons. He, along with several others in the cast, might do well to slow down and enunciate their heavily-accented dialogue a bit more precisely.
Although the production is admirable, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” has several glaring flaws as a play. Too many characters are one-dimensional, defined by a single tic: an obsession with delivering news, an obsession with telescopes, a tendency to talk to rocks. Also, McDonagh descends to lazy comedy ideas, such as having a little old lady in a wheelchair talk dirty for comic effect.
Most damaging of all, his plot twists are not always set up well enough to shock us. The last half-hour of this play consists of a series of twists, but some are telegraphed, and some are just plain contrived.
This is in contrast to his “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” which opened Friday at Interplayers. That is a more cleverly focused play, with twists that are startlingly effective.
Yet even if this play isn’t as well-written, it is actually funnier and (slightly) less depressing. My advice is to sample them both, as long as you have the stomach for McDonagh’s grim view of humanity, as well as lots of Irish profanity.