Martin McDonagh's fiercely Irish, black comedy opens
By Elliot Boswell
In Martin McDonagh's "The Cripple of Inishmaan," which opened last night here on campus, 'Cripple' Billy lurches through a host of fellow grotesque characters, alienated as much by his title as by the disfiguring limp he bears. In a play that takes so much pleasure in language, it is perhaps unsurprising to watch how one word - cripple - is toyed with, altered, and finally left unrecognizable at show's end by the raving, bleak, often-hilarious journey it takes.
Part of a yet-unfinished trilogy entitled the "Aran Islands Trilogy," "The Cripple" is set circa-1934 and is the story of the simple, pleasant outcast Billy Claven, a boy disfigured at birth, and his efforts to get a part in a Hollywood documentary about life on the isolated island community he is a part of.
Naturally, Billy is hindered by his two aunties, who fear the ramifications of his departure, and by the cast of local characters who each have their own concerns about his venture, and their own motivations for wanting him to go (or stay).
When the play was released in 1996, McDonagh was hailed as the first great playwright of the 21st century and the heir to Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, a reputation which ensuing plays like "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" and "The Pillowman" only cemented. His fiercely, ardently Irish plays are rife with black humor, violence, coarse, bizarre characters and a sense for theatricality that has resulted in two of them garnering Tony nominations.
The current incarnation of "The Cripple" has been brought to life at the hands of graduate student John Christiansen, who is better known as the director of last year's surreal - one former cast member called it "'Waiting for Godot' on crack" - one-act "Line." Christiansen admitted that the raw, provincial qualities of McDonagh's play were initially difficult to translate to the affluent, relatively progressive stage of The Bluff.
"This is not the Ireland of TV," he said. "I gave (the actors) tidbits of information about what this Ireland is like, to get them in touch with an environment where nothing seems to change."
The set was bare and quaint, with green, compartmentalized pastures stretching out in the distance through the windows, and the lighting was functional - warmer oranges for scenes inside the little shop, and greens and blues for outdoor settings. The persistent sound of crashing waves serves as an aural manifestation of the monotony of the island life, for on an island that is only three miles wide, the sound of the sea is a constant reminder of confinement.
The cast of grotesques come and go: Billy's two aunties, Kate and Eileen, look after the small store they jointly run; Slippy Helen (whom Billy pines after) is a sadistic beauty whose hapless brother Bartley wants nothing more than a telescope in life; Babbybobby is the intimidating oarsman who gives Billy a shot in the Hollywood movie; and Johnnypateenmike is the local, (relatively) harmless gossip-monger who loads his mother up with alcohol in a fruitless attempt to kill her off.
As the characters play out their interactions, sometimes tenderly and sometimes cruelly (with more than one instance of egg-to-forehead contact), McDonagh's script continually insists on defying sentimentality: In one such instance, Billy's seemingly heartfelt apology upon his return to the island is met not with open arms, but with blows from a lead pipe. After a life of insularity, the characters fear the change that his involvement in an American film threatens to bring, and the more they insist on marginalizing Billy for his exterior, the clearer their own crippling, personal defects become.
Even with a couple of miscastings, all of the performances from the ensemble cast are fine, and freshman Philip Orazio as Johnnypateenmike and sophomore Patrick Rexroat as Cripple Billy both hit all the right notes. But it is junior Heather Petersen as Eileen who is the most consistently compelling. Petersen's Eileen is sharp and sorrowful, benevolent and baleful, sometimes within the same scene, and when Billy finally comes home, her reaction is the only one that makes it clear how desperately this isolated little community needs each other.
Though some accents fade in and out, the play's language is brilliant and often downright spellbinding. Characters are lost, confused and alienated by their conceptions of one another - to say "Billy" without the accustomed prefix would mean normalizing him and in doing so, acknowledging the state of their own insularity - and their increasingly tenuous grasp on a fragile existence on a rock off the coast of Ireland.
"(The play) depicts Western Ireland as a place where this isolation and mundaneness can damage you, damage the family and render the healing powers of the Church inert," Christiansen said.
UP's "Cripple" is far from a perfect show, although it is certainly a good one. But the fact that a black tale about a poor, insular Irish community of 70 years ago can reach and touch a contemporary, college-age audience is not only proof of this cast's abilities, but of McDonagh's transcendent brand of art itself.
'Cripple' plays tonight through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
