"Made in China' at the Adrienne

What's funnier than a Kung Fu Irish gangster attacking his former associate with a baseball bat in a cramped apartment? How about the latter defending himself with a stolen prosthetic leg?

Well, almost. In Inis Nua's current production of Mark O'Rowe's darkly humorous and nasty Made in China, the cast and director Tom Reing only find what's funny in the second half.

Inis Nua is dedicated to producing contemporary plays about the cultures of the British Isles. In his curtain speech, Reing explained that O'Rowe comprises the third member of the Big Three contemporary Irish playwrights, along with Conor McPherson (whose The Seafarer opens at the Arden this week) and the immensely popular Martin McDonagh. Like McDonagh's work, O'Rowe's hyper-masculine Made in China blends long stretches of male relationship-driven narrative and dialogue into a violent but funny plot.

But where Philadelphia productions of McDonagh's work—whether at the Wilma, Lantern, or Iron Age— provoked peals of laughter with every jaw cracked or insult delivered (even when picking on a crippled teenager), Reing's first act staging only occasionally manages to temper the offensiveness with humor.

A botched call to action

In Made in China, the affable but stupid Paddy visits his friend Hughie to watch Chinese import action-movies. But the appearance of local gang lieutenant Kilby reminds Hughie that as an "up man" in the local echelon, he's got a "bit o' business" to conduct.

Distracted by a mother dying in the hospital, Hughie botches the job of breaking another man's pins. In retaliation, Kilby dangles the possibility of initiating Paddy into the gang in Hughie's place, turning a longstanding friendship into an opportunity for ambitious vendetta.

Unlike a Guy Ritchie film— which makes similarly outrageous, hard-ass thugs look both cool and ridiculous— Charlie DelMarcelle's gangster Kilby lacked the exaggerated bluster demanded by his character's karate-movie antics. Jered McLenigan as Paddy's friend Hughie provided an amply reasonable foil, but to what?

Reaching for my glossary

The thick Irish brogue these actors slathered across every word didn't help either; as with Shakespeare, I needed ten minutes to acclimate my hearing and often found myself turning to the program's glossary. There's something to be said for sacrificing authenticity for comprehensibility, especially at the end of Act I, when the dialogue devolves into a screaming match. Only Mike Dees's deft evolution of character as Paddy mastered the material throughout.

But whatever McLenigan and DelMarcelle decided to do differently after intermission mended all of the first act's shortcomings. Suddenly, DelMarcelle puffed out his arms and strutted across the set with the Chuck Norris action-pants-style ferocity and campy silliness that he lacked in the first. And just as suddenly, the audience felt willing to laugh at the same style of humor that evoked silence earlier.

J. Alex Cordaro staggers his excellently choreographed two-part fist- and bat-fight with an intermission that allowed each character (and the audience, I'm sure) a breather to shake off the concussive blows of Round One. People howled at the crushing acts of violence the way we used to laugh at the Three Stooges.

In real life, I couldn't imagine laughing at something so nasty. But in the Irish plays Inis Nua is helping to popularize here, the theater's magic gave me reason.