"A Behanding in Spokane' on Broadway

The Yikes! factor cubed. Martin McDonagh's vicious hilarity (known to theatergoers via The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Cripple of Inishmaan, and to moviegoers via In Bruges) plus the wildly unsettling presence of Christopher Walken— here hollow-voiced, hollow-eyed, hollow cheeked, missing a hand and snarling— well, yikes!

A Behanding in Spokane is about a man named Carmichael (Walken with a long gray hairdo, a long overcoat, sporting a little pot belly and walking with that signature bizarre combo of stealthy grace and mincing step). Early on, in a cheesy hotel room, he tells his story:

Forty-seven years ago, a group of hillbillies held his hand down over a railroad track until the train arrived to cut it off. They left "the lad" there, and "waved him goodbye with his own hand." Since then, Carmichael has been searching— not for the hillbillies (revenge would be far too straightforward a motive for McDonagh)— but for the hand.

Two young weed-selling scammers, Toby (Anthony Mackie) and Marilyn (Zoe Kazan— wait until you see her climb a radiator pipe halfway to the ceiling), have brought him a hand, but the wrong hand. Mayhem and misunderstandings ensue, exacerbated by the slimy hotel receptionist (Sam Rockwell). Stupidity—the usual component that fuels a McDonagh plot— combines here with American racism.

(Is there non-stupid racism? Well, are there non-white hillbillies?)

This is the first McDonagh play to be set in America, with American characters, and his Irish lunatics/scary guys are funnier (maybe because the language/accents are more exotic to my ear; maybe the Irish don't find them so funny). But McDonagh's "Leenane" plays and his "Inishmore" and "Inishmaan" plays are fiercer and more extravagant and more substantial, with more to say about dangerously obsessed and delusional people. In those works we feel a creepy, thrilling gamut of emotions from appalled to heartwrenched for their characters. The Pillowman, set not in Ireland but in some mysterious totalitarian country, is stuffed with ideas about families and governments and the power of stories.

Here, by contrast, McDonagh's story-telling monologues are neither as riveting nor as revealing of character. The syntax and vocabulary is sometimes off-kilter for American voices. And the characters are less developed and seem, therefore, to be merely cartoons and plot devices.

Less political, less philosophical, less provocative, less shocking and therefore less interesting, A Behanding in Spokane isn't really much of a play. But, with Walken in it, it's a great show. Whether the script would work as anything other than a regional faux-bold little-theater diversion without this actor (whose fan base is out in force in the audience) is anybody's guess.