McDonagh's "Skull in Connemara,' by the Lantern (1st review)

The playwright Martin McDonagh reigns supreme over contemporary Irish theater. In 1996, four of his plays ran simultaneously in West End theaters— a feat not seen since Shakespeare— and his work appears in three of the eight offerings in Philadelphia's current Irish Theatre Festival.

His success has spawned a number of imitators— not surprisingly, since the McDonagh recipe is simple. Just stir together these basic ingredients:

— Pervasive, senseless violence, mostly perpetrated by one brutal character who is motivated solely by animal cunning.
— Another role representing a naÓ¯ve, earnest morality.
— A bumbling though thoroughly nasty authority figure.
— Characters eking out a living in marginalized professions.
— At least one drunken scene in which the major action occurs via comedic, and usually slapstick (or vaudevillian) devices.
— Interminable monologues seemingly designed to bore the audience with exposition.
— Dialogue filtered through "typical" Irish sentiment— for instance, the halting reverence in cadence upon the mention of the dead or one's parents.
— A plot driven by the need to uncover the truth about some cloudy event that occurred long before the play began.
— Rampant gossip that poisons all relationships until said event is resolved.
— All of the above lathered in expletive and tinged with nasty humor that often veers into the macabre.

Gravedigger's secret

True to this formula, the Lantern Theater's current production of A Skull in Connemara opens on the meaningless banter (about the weather, no less) between Mick (Stephen Novelli) and Maryjohnny (Ellen Mulroney). Twenty minutes of conversation later, we learn that Mick works as a gravedigger; every year he moves the bones of the long dead to clear room in a crowded cemetery for the newly deceased.

This year, Mick must unearth the remnants of his own wife, seven years dead after a mysterious drunk driving accident killed her with him at the wheel. Most of the town— here embodied by Maryjohnny— "casts aspersions" over this event, believing that Mick wrecked the car on purpose, or that he murdered her outright and staged the crash as cover.

Mick finds help in this unfortunate task from his young assistant, Mairtin (Jake Blouch), the aforementioned depiction of native, if stupid, goodness. Mairtin's brother Thomas (Jered McLenigan) plays the bumbling, cartoonish cliché of a cop trying to entrap Mick into a confession. Throw in the remaining elements of drink, six dozen uses of the word "fuck," comedic violence and dark humor, and the plot lumbers forward for two hours toward the truth and an untidy, blood-spattered resolution.

Struggling cast

Even theatergoers who find Irish theater a novelty may find A Skull in Connemara a bit of a bore. Co-directors M. Craig Getting and Kathryn MacMillan strip the play of all buoyancy, deflating the laughter by letting things plod along without energy.

The performances don't compensate much either. Novelli's remarkable skill renders his Mick watchable but not enjoyable. McLenigan initially generates laughs with his thoroughly Irish— though equally pompous—version of Cliff Clavin from TV's "Cheers." But he drifts out of this characterization to fall back into the similar tone and speech rhythms that McLenigan displayed in Irish roles at Inis Nua.

As for Ellen Mulroney as Maryjohnny: I can't say much. I could barely understand a word she said.

Remarkable set

Only Blouch, as Mick's young assistant Mairtin, consistently delights with his performance, using a singsong, whiny voice and ad-libbed physical comedy to strike the balance between the humorous and the macabre.

Dirk Durosette's remarkable construction of beams and crosses hovers over the multi-layered set of graveyards and a cottage. But it can't by itself distract from the play's slack pace and lethargic mood. For fans of recent Irish plays, the Lantern's production yields only the welcoming familiarity of recognition without the joy of discovering something new.

Like McDonagh, Edgar Allan Poe spawned so many imitators that his work became a cliché. Yet Poe's work is still worth reading, more than 160 years after his death. A Skull in Connemara makes me wonder if future generations will say the same of McDonagh.♦


To read anther review by Robert Zaller, click here.