Great Scots

THEATER REVIEW: Gagarian Way

by David Anthony Fox

In the late '90s, when playwright Martin McDonagh grabbed hold of Irish drama, he took traditionally tragic themes — poverty, political strife, alcoholism, psychological violence and turned them inside-out. Gone was the mournful lyricism so often associated with the genre. McDonagh offered the same old tropes, but reimagined as coruscating black comedy.

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It was a shot heard 'round the world — or at least around the U.K. In Gagarin Way, Scottish playwright Gregory Burke offers what is unmistakably a McDonagh fan letter. (Even the locutions are McDonagh-esque: One character describes Sartre's Being and Nothingness as "a load of fuckin' shite.")It also looks like a tribute to Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Worthy sources both, and although Gagarin Way doesn't quite deliver on its initial punchiness, it's often entertaining and thought-provoking, and handsomely mounted here by director Tom Reing.

Two workers in a factory are in the bumpy process of kidnapping an executive of their parent company. (An unwitting security guard also gets roped into the process.) Apparently these workers — Gary and Eddie — see this as a political statement, but it's clear from the start that their understanding of global economics is pretty sketchy.

Gagarin Way in a sense is about terrorism, but not the multinational, statement-making kind its protagonists imagine. It's really about localized rage, fueled by that basest of all needs: self-interest.

I'm not sure to what extent the playwright himself recognizes the confusion.How much of the political palaver are we meant to take seriously?In our current state of global chaos, grassroots terrorism seems almost quaint, but that's part of what makes the play interesting. Still, both the script and this production could evoke a deeper sense of pathos at one end of the scale, and more nail-biting terror at the other.

Then again, the sheer ordinariness of some of the dialogue evokes its own eerie tension, and there is some very good acting by the ensemble: Brian McCann (Frank), Jered McLenigan (Eddie), Kevin Meehan (Tom) and especially Jared Michael Delany (Gary), whose authoritative stillness is scary as hell. (But I hear their accents as more Irish than Scottish.Another show of McDonagh-love?)

Through Feb. 7, $20, Amaryllis and Inis Nua theatre cos. at Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 887-260-1126, amaryllistheatre.org.