The Cripple of Inishmaan at UPS
“Everyone in Ireland be friendly,” says JohnnyPateenmike, a character in Martin McDonagh’s play The Cripple of Inishmaan, now playing at the University of Puget Sound Norton Clapp Theatre. “It’s what we’re famous for.”
Never have more ironic words been spoken.
Martin McDonagh, the London-born Irish playwright who exploded onto the theater scene in the mid 1990s, wrote the rough drafts of his first seven plays in nine months. In 1997, at age 27, he had four plays showing simultaneously in London’s West End. He similarly took New York by storm, starting with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which he wrote in eight days.
Being that prolific and that successful, the playwright in me hates him. But theater-goer in me loves him. McDonagh is definitely the real deal.
TAG gave Tacoma an excellent production of Leenane in 2001. Now the University of Puget Sound Department of Theatre Arts is trying their hand at Inishmaan. It’s a solid production of an excellent play. It is by turns hilarious, thought-provoking, and deeply disturbing.
In The Cripple of Inishmaan, the harsh landscape of Ireland’s remote Aran Islands in 1934 have turned the people small-minded and bitter. Their cruelty to each other is so casual, so common, that most people barely notice it at all.
“You shouldn’t laugh at other people’s misfortunes,” one character tells another, who pauses before asking, earnestly, “Why?”
No one is spared this cruelty completely, but one person experiences far more than his fair share: Billy, the gentle, but disabled young man who everyone refers to as “Cripple Billy,” despite his repeated efforts to get the island folk to simply call him by his name. When Billy gets a chance to audition for a Hollywood film being shot nearby, he sees his chance to leave his island prison for good. But this being dramatic theater, and a Martin McDonagh play at that, things don’t go quite as he plans.
“Plenty of people around here are more cripple than me!” Billy cries plaintively at one point. “But it’s not on the outside.”
For me, the fascinating thing about this play is that it’s not always the characters you expect who are the most cruel — and, conversely, kindness is ultimately found in the most unexpected of places.
Director Marilyn Bennett keep things moving (and has, except for the first few minutes, thankfully kept the Irish brogues from being too thick to be understood). She expertly mines the play’s perfect balance of finding humor even in the horrible — whether it’s a man trying to poison his acerbic mother with alcohol or a bitter Irish lass who, fed up with being sexually harassed by the men in town, alternates between kissing and pinching the men who desire her. And she also lets the play build to its considerable emotional punch.
This is a college student production so the acting by the nine-person cast is occasionally uneven (though Kate Cantwell and Sophie Lowenstein are standouts as Billy’s surrogate aunts). And some suspension of disbelief is required on the ages of some of the characters.
But at $11 a seat ($7 for UPS students), this play is a steal.
The set, by Kurt Walls, is sensational, with both an authentic dirt floor for the realistic stone cabin and a sandy beach.
I’ve been to the Aran Islands, and can attest that it’s a stark, desolate landscape that causes people to want to do terrible things; when a group of girls staying in my hostel came home drunk and loud at three AM, I’ve never been more tempted to strangle anyone in my life.
But, of course, The Cripple of Inishmaan isn’t really about the Irish or the Aran Islands. It’s about the casual, oblivious cruelty that lives within us all — and those fleeting moments of compassion that might, possibly, redeem us.
Are people 51% good and 49% evil, or vice-versa? It’s pretty clear what McDonagh thinks. After watching this play, you’ll find it impossible not to ponder the question too.
BRENT HARTINGER is a Tacoma-based novelist and playwright. The Northwest Playwrights’ Alliance will produce his stage adaption of his book, “Geography Club”, in February. His latest book is “Dreamquest”, a kids’ fantasy. Visit him online at BrentHartinger.com .
The Cripple of Inishmaan
by Martin McDonagh
Thursday, November 1 – Saturday, November 3 at 7:30 pm with a Saturday matinee at 2 p.m.
Norton Clapp Theatre, University of the Puget Sound
Tickets available at Wheelock Information Center. Remaining tickets at the door.