Top to Bottom: Colin Hamell as Padraic and Lynn R. Guerra as Mairead in NRT's Lt. of Inishmore (http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/10/31/seeing_red_in_inishmore/);Poster design for American Repertory Theatre's The Communist Dracula Pageant (October 18 to November 9, 2008); Photo from 2006 NY production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore (http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/theater/reviews/28inis.html?pagewanted=all) featuring David Wilmot and Kerry Condon; New Repertory Theatre's poster (October 26 to November 16)Well, it was a hit and a miss in my theatre-going adventures this past week. I made my way out to the somewhat bleak suburb of Watertown last Thursday night (its saving grace a discount mall with Filene's Basement, Marshall's etc.!) to the lovely and quite new Arsenal Center for the Arts, home of the New Repertory Theatre, now in its 25th anniversary season. I have a hate-love relationship with bad boy of Irish playwrights Martin McDonagh...I hate that I love his work. The over-the-top violence in his plays, the often sick levels of psychopathology of his characters, the bleak worldview...if only he wasn't so damned smart and funny to boot. This play, one of his entire oeuvre written in a nine month stint in the early 90s when he was in his early 20s (enough to make him well-hated right there!), is one of the Aran Islands Trilogy. I saw another one, The Cripple of Inishmaan, at Victoria's Belfry Theatre a few years back, and although I felt it was overwritten, I enjoyed it. Inishmore brings new meaning to the term 'black comedy' as McDonagh skewers Irish terrorism in a satirical story of a cat, his IRA splinter group sicko owner Padraic and the small Aran island community he comes from, off the coast of Ireland.
Padraic has left the IRA as it's not militant enough for him and when we meet him first, he's quite cheerily torturing a pot dealer who sells to school kids. The scene is both horrifying and funny as Padraic prepares to slice off the dealer's nipple (of his choice) after already having taken off two of his toenails. This jollity is interrupted by a phone call from Padraic's father Donny, who has been caring for his son's beloved cat Wee Thomas. Wee Thomas, we know, has been killed in an unfortunate accident and panic is spreading through the village as everyone knows what Padraic is capable of when he is seeking justice and revenge. Sure enough, Padraic returns home in haste and is met at the ferry dock by young Mairead, who fancies herself a rebel-in-training and idolizes Padraic, and the two of them fall instantly into passionate love. As Padraic tries to find out what has happened to Wee Thomas (and is preparing to execute his father and Mairead's layabout hippie brother Davey on suspicions of a cover-up), the tables are turned when he himself is taken by the splinter group he has splintered off from. His crime? He is too radical and too violent even for this ultra-radical and ultra-violent terrorist branch of the IRA! So he is marched out to be shot, but his love Mairead comes to the rescue (we've already learned she's blinded a herd of cows with her air rifle, so it's not too much of a spoiler to find out that she can do the same with wanna-be executioners). There follows from here a climactic scene of unending gore as Padraic and Mairead take out the now-blinded trio of assassins and then force Donny and Davey into cutting up their bodies for disposal. One final twist, which I won't divulge, leads to a new Lieutenant of Inishmore taking over from Padraic, Wee Thomas arriving home safe and sound after all the bloody mayhem, and drunken losers Donny and Davey wondering where it will end.
There are morals beneath the surface in McDonagh's plays, to be sure (although this play is lighter-handed than the real downer of The Pillowman), but he is also out to entertain...and he succeeds. His ear for dialogue is terrific and the characters come off the stage as fully rounded and yet completely uncliched...all of them are originals, even the smaller roles. And the New Rep impressed me mightily in my first visit by offering a production that was flawless. A top-notch acting ensemble with fine performances from everyone, Irish accents and all. A lovely set design by Janie E. Howland (who also designed the recent Follies I saw at Lyric Stage), nice lighting and sound (some great musical choices for scene transitions) and some effectively gory stage blood and body parts props. But my highest praise goes to the director David R. Gammons; he has steered this production with a clear hand throughout. Every scene has its beats presented with clarity, the show has a constant rhythm and pace and his staging of the climax where Padraic and Mairead perform a pas de deux of murder was inspired. The strongest direction I've seen so far this season.
One additional thought on violence onstage: I've written about this before (see my review of Rage on my Victoria theatre blog at http://www.vicreviews.blogspot.com/ ) and generally speaking I'm not into graphic depictions of violence on stage or screen, although I admit to enjoying a good action flick from time to time...which makes me a hypocrite I guess. And as I watched Donny and Davey chatting away as they slice off fingers and heads of dead bodies at the end of this play, I wondered how an audience would respond to a film version of this play, where these actions would be depicted as much more real than is ever possible on stage. Stage props of bodies never look real, and when guns go off and actors burst blood caps in their mouths and SMs set off explosions that cover people with blood, we laugh (in this play anyway), partly because of the fakery. One of the scene transitions late in this show has two murdered characters carry their own dissected corpses back on stage, place them carefully, then squirt the other actors and each other with bottles of stage blood...now that's funny! Theatre can hold its own to film anyday at the level of psychological or emotional violence, but at the level of physical and visceral violence, the sense of fakery is what protects us. And in McDonagh's way off-kilter world, it also gives us a chance to laugh our way through the actual memory of the deaths of thousands in the struggles to free Ireland, oftentimes Irish killing Irish, as is always the sad case in a civil war. I recently saw Ken Loach's powerful film The Wind that Shakes the Barley about this very thing, and it comes down to brother killing brother. Believe me, it is no laughing matter. Thank goodness for the theatre and for playwrights like McDonagh who insist on entertaining us as they press our faces into the endless muck of humanity.
Speaking of muck of humanity, the next show I saw features two of the biggest mucks in the endless row of assholes who ran countries and murdered their countrymen (and often beyond) in the twentieth century, a cheery little theatrical revue about Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu of Romania called The Communist Dracula Pageant by Americans for Americans with Hallucinations, Phosphorescence and Bears (the title alone sets off alarms doesn't it?). The Ceausescus ruled Romania and engendered a brutal cult of the personality for over two decades, repressing their people and driving the country back to the middle ages. When there was a revolt in December 1989, mostly as a result of the perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union that spelled the end of European communism, not too much fuss was made worldwide at the news that the tyrant couple had been arrested, put on trial, found guilty of genocide and summarily executed.
This seems a somewhat strange subject for theatrical investigation, but I was game to see what playwright Anne Washburn and the ensemble company of ART would come up with. What I saw, unfortunately, was a hodgepodge of a docudrama that feels unfocussed and unfinished, performed with professional bravado by a company that must shake their heads in the dressing room after every show and then head off to the nearest bar. The 105 minute show starts off quite well, framing the play as a pageant performed for the Ceaucescus to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of their infamous ancestral countryman, Vlad Tepes, otherwise known as Dracula. The intertwining of Dracula's tale with the Ceaucescu's seems promising, but things quickly devolve. What we then see is a mishmash of scenes and monologues that purport to take us through the last days of the dictatorship, up to their execution. But there is no throughline to the play, nothing for the audience to hang onto, or quite frankly, to even care much about. The Ceausescus are hardly worth our empathy, nor is Dracula, so we could engage with the Romanian people who won back their country. But no one is presented to us in any depth, actors keep turning out to us and telling us this scene is as transcribed from trial transcripts or videotapes (Why tell us this? Can we not read program notes? Are we not literate and educated audience members? Please don't talk down to me...I hate that). To add to the lacklustredness and so-whatedness of it all, the production is poorly directed by Annie Kauffman (how sad is it to slam a show directed and written by two women...sigh). She has a clearly talented group of 16 actors (16!!), including lead actors Thomas Derrah (Nicolae), Karen MacDonald (Elena) and Will LeBow (Dracula/Functionary) whose resumes include dozens of ART past productions and clutches of awards for their work (I saw LeBow in Huntington's season-opener How Shakespeare Won the West). Clearly, she doesn't know what to do with them. Scene transitions and the internal staging of scenes feels clunky, there's way too much dead air, and she hasn't found an effective way to make the randomness of the script (po-mo anyone?) theatrically engaging. Sure, there are projected scene titles and even some videotaped scenes...what there isn't is excitement, innovation or even very much energy. The actors do their best with what little has been given them, but I felt for them at curtain call, bowing to a "smattering of polite applause" (one of the projected surtitles referring to the reception of Ceaucescu's final public speech). My collective creation bent would have tossed both the playwright and the director out of the rehearsal room and let the actors have at it (with open-minded designers and maybe an excellent dramaturg)...chances are they could have come up with a show ten times more thrilling than this somewhat limp fish...too bad.
