Well, it's finally happened: Martin McDonagh has come home. If you for some reason haven't heard the name Martin McDonagh, he is Broadway and the
Well, it's finally happened: Martin McDonagh has come home. If you for some reason haven't heard the name Martin McDonagh, he is Broadway and the West End's enfant auteur de jour who has two shows running in both London and New York and has two more set to open soon. The twenty-seven year old Irish playwright has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the great glowing hopes of the English-speaking world," and "destined" by The New Republic "to be one of the theatrical luminaries of the 21st Century," in addition to becoming the toast of the theater world on both sides of the Atlantic.
McDonagh's work reached the Pacific last week, as the Geffen Playhouse staged the Los Angeles premiere of The Cripple of Inishmaan. The great cocktail party anecdote about McDonagh is that he grew up disliking theater, greatly favoring the cinema, especially American films from Sturges to Scorsese (supposedly, it was only after seeing a performance of David Mamet's American Buffalo that McDonagh fell in love with the theater). Therefore, it seems fitting that McDonagh's Hollywood debut was staged in a theater bearing the name of one of the biggest moguls in town.
Given Mr. McDonagh's cineastic leanings, it would seem a forgone conclusion that the author would be very anxious about his first Hollywood close-up. This even considering his blind script deal with Paramount Pictures and the luminous reviews showered on both Cripple and The Beauty Queen of Leenane - is first major success which swept the acting categories at this years Tony's and earned him an Evening Standard award in England. Given this praise, expectations for the Los Angeles Premiere were high; however, this promised not to have been a problem for McDonagh, who Ben Brantley in The New York Times declared "a master... at subverting audience expectations." No kidding.
Los Angeles did not expect a disaster. The acting is almost uniformly stale, the directing is unfocused, the music sounds like James Horner's outtakes from Titanic, and worst of all: there were a more than a few empty seats after intermission. While there were, of course, members of the audience who laughed throughout the play and seemed to enjoy the show, the applause at curtain ranged only from thunderous to near-tremendous, which in Los Angeles - where not falling off the stage merits standing ovations - does not bode well. Even the Los Angeles Times, whose drama critics are generous at best and gushing most often, had few positive things to say in its review. Good thing his screenplay deal is blind.
While a dreadful Los Angeles production is hardly news, the most disconcerting thing about the show is what it seems to reveal about the play itself. The spectacular reviews McDonagh has garnered have all come from productions starring, if not the original Irish casts, then at least genuine Irish actors, whereas the Los Angeles cast consists primarily of television actors, the best of which appeared in landmark shows such as Alf and Kate & Ally. Not surprisingly, the dialogue does not flow as gracefully as it would coming from native Irish tongues - in fact, with the notable exception of Derdriu Ring as Helen, the one believable performance in the whole show - all of the actors attempt and fail at Irish accents which continually shatters any illusion that the proceedings are taking place in Ireland.
Without the luxury of an intimate bond between performer and play (and perhaps the crutch of foreign novelty), the text of Cripple seems startlingly trite. Granted, a bad performance does have a way of souring even the finest works; however, at another recent Los Angeles Theater-going Nightmare, the first West Coast staging of 1997 Nobel Laureate Dario Fo's "We Won't Pay, We Won't Pay," in which the performers' accents ranged from bad Brooklynese to Ita-nglish that would make a Chef Boyardee commercial seem genuine, the wit and craftsmanship of the text still was evident despite the travesty going on around it. In "Cripple," sadly, this was not the case. As the production continually flailed about looking for anything remotely dramatic, McDonagh's words provided no spark for its players and no glimpse of why the show has been such a success elsewhere.
People who have seen "Beauty Queen" in New York have all told me of the thrill of the performances and the joy of seeing a new play performed with a seasoned yet vigorous cast. While brash and fledgling theater (and McDonagh's work is both these things) is exiting, it cannot hide weak plotting, obvious characterizations, and a reliance on a puzzling mix of modern shock-vulgarity and antiquated sentimentality. For all the "new," "fresh," and "innovative" superlatives that have been used to characterize McDonagh's work, The Cripple of Inishmaan is little more than the fable of the Ugly Duckling with Irish cuss words. Shite!
For example, when Billy is picked by the film crew to go back with them to Hollywood, despite the shock the other characters experience on stage, I find it hard to believe that anyone in the theater was surprised. Even more predictable than these "twists" are lines like Cripple Billy saying : "there are plenty ?round here just as crippled as me, only it isn't on the outside it shows." Moments after reciting this, Billy is beaten over the head with a pipe. If only McDonagh were truly bold and was doing this to echo how we the audience have just been beaten over the head with trite lines like Billy's. He's not, of course. Despite all the reviews of how funny McDonagh's plays are, in the pubished version of the text, just released by Vintage, Billy' line is followed by a dramatic "Pause." Believe me, the pause is not for laughter.
Other shopworn techniques that McDonagh uses are the Soliloquy-as-Rehearsal trick borrowed perhaps from the "I coulda' been a contender" scene in Scorsese's Raging Bull (which borrowed from On The Waterfront) where Billy's painful admissions turn out to be only his preparations for a Hollywood audition. Also present is the age-old Kiss-of-the-Maiden Redemption where Billy decides against suicide only after Helen returns to give him his first kiss. Finally, the play ends in a homage to the gross-out cinema of the 1990's with a coda where the lights dim on Billy as he hacks-up blood.
The one aspect of the play that did strike me as being particularly authentic was the pronunciation of a word (not in the glossary of Gaelic vernacular, generously included in the playbill), which on a recent trip to Ireland I found particularly interesting. The Irish express something roughly sounding like "Phil'em" when they say the word "film." Every actor, throughout the play, when speaking about the Flaherty documentary gave a perfect articulation for the word film. I guess for the Los Angeles opening, what else really matters?
