It's Not Easy Being Green

Martin McDonagh skewers the pervasive image of the tipsy, sentimental Irish in The Cripple of Inishmaan.


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Published: Nov 8, 2006

"A rake of shite." That's what Cripple Billy calls the stereotypical Irish dialogue he's given for his Hollywood screen test in Martin McDonagh's savagely funny play The Cripple Of Inishmaan. Billy quotes the "arse-faced lines": "An Irishman I am, begora! With a heart and a spirit on me not crushed be a hundred years of oppression. I'll be getting me shillelagh out next, wait'll you see."

McDonagh skewers the pervasive image of the tipsy, sentimental Irish in Iron Age Theatre's powerful follow-up to last season's successful A Skull in Connemara, another wickedly dark and violent McDonagh comedy.

IRISH BREAKFAST: Bartley (David Yashin) gets a lesson in the art of "egg pegging" from his sister Helen (Katy O'Leary).

Kate (Linda Newsted) and Eileen (Susan Giddings) raised Cripple Billy (Adam Altman), orphaned under mysterious circumstances. Their neighbors, a mean lot, include self-appointed "newsman" Johnnypateenmike (Steve Hatzai), who trades gossip for food, and teenage siblings Helen (Katy O'Leary) and Bartley (David Yashin). Their banter is interrupted by news that director Robert Flaherty is coming to make his 1934 film The Man Of Aran. Helen, Bartley and Cripple Billy set forth hoping for stardom — but Billy doesn't return.

McDonagh brilliantly parcels out what his characters — and we — are allowed to know, suckering all into a web of assumptions and surprises. Under the characters' often humorous coarseness lurk deeper truths: Billy not only wants to live as a normal person, insisting in vain that people drop "Cripple" from his name, but also yearns to understand his parents' drowning. People tease him (these characters are merciless, like a pack of 10-year-old children) with the tale that they committed suicide over their baby's deformities. McDonagh tantalizes us with several versions before knocking us over with the truth.

Co-directors and designers Randall Wise and John Doyle provide a huge, detailed setting, as always, creating Kate and Eileen's shop, a chapel and other locations in lavish, loving detail. The cast likewise excels, led by Altman's fiercely independent, nakedly agonized Billy and O'Leary's mischievous, egg-pegging Helen, and completed by Steve McLean's beleaguered doctor, Judy Clifford as Johnnypateenmike's ancient, whiskey-swilling mother, and Matthew McDonough as Babbybobby, who seems like the village's most principled, mature citizen until he, too, lives down to his environment.

Spiked with running jokes about Ireland ("It might not be such a bad place if ______ want to come to it"), McDonagh's jabs at our jolly St. Patrick's Day perceptions punctuate a surprisingly touching story about hope battling despair.

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)

The Cripple Of Inishmaan

Through Nov. 26, Iron Age Theatre, 208 DeKalb St., Norristown, 610-279-1013, www.ironagetheatre.org