Martin McDonagh is the bad boy of modern Irish theater. A young Londoner of County Galway heritage, he grew up with enough distance on the plummeting souls huddled on the impoverished western edge of the island to envision them with a bleak purity of insight. No gruff but cheerful poverty for the poor sods of The Lonesome West, the culmination of his grim Leenane trilogy.
The stuff of tragedy, indeed. In this case, two brothers return from the funeral of their father only to resume positions at each other’s throats, continuing to bicker, scream, and assault each other with lethal weapons. But since there are no tragic flaws in evidence in this godforsaken corner of our planetary speck, we’ll have to settle for comedy to understand this delirious tragedy.
Yes, between playwright McDonagh, director Judith Swift, and the marvelous work of four actors, it’s a knee-slapping time we’re having through the dark events at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (through February 26).
Leenane is a small town in Connemara, Galway, the same setting as the two prior plays in the trilogy, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and A Skull inConnemara. In them, an erstwhile dutiful daughter takes a fatal poker to the head of her mother, and a gravedigger husband reflects on what drove him to bury an ax in the head of his wife. Both murders are mentioned in The Lonesome West, and it’s not coincidental that both killings were up-close and personal. In this play too, grudges and passions are too intimate to be satisfied by a drive-by shooting.
Coleman Connor (Jim O’Brien) and his younger brother Valene (Tony Estrella) delight too much in tormenting each other to not be at it nose-to-nose, lest they miss a single vein-bulging response to a cruelty. Valene is top dog when we meet them, begrudging every sip of poteen and 17p bag of potato chips dispensed to or stolen by his hungry brother. And this was the day of their father’s funeral, which you’d think might bring out a brotherly bond.
But poor old dad died from an accidental blast to the head from a shotgun held by Coleman — witnessed, fortunately, by Valene. How terrible if there were yet another murder in this desolate town. Perhaps affected most deeply is Father Welsh (Chris Byrnes), the new parish priest who has winced at the murders accumulating on his watch and will soon have a parishioner’s suicide added to his professional failures. Girleen Kelleher (Karen Carpenter) delights the most in making fun of him, in her jocular if pornographic way, jesting with Valene. The poor priest is tormented even by the under-12 girls soccer team he coaches, a bloodthirsty lot notorious for hospitalizing their opponents.
