1/29/09
LA
TIMES
Critic's Choice!
By Charlotte Stoudt
If Beckett had written a police
procedural, it might feel a lot like “A
Skull in Connemara,” Martin McDonagh’s absurdist murder mystery
now receiving its Los Angeles premiere at Theatre Tribe.
There’s not much to do in rural Galway besides drink, play bingo
and die. In fact, enough people drop dead that the local gravedigger,
Mick (Morlan Higgins), has to clear out the churchyard every seven years
to make room for fresh corpses. It’s a ritual that troubles his
drinking partner, old Maryjohnny (Jenny O’Hara); the local cop
(John K. Linton) and his half-wit younger brother, Mairtin (Jeff Kerr
McGivney) -- especially since they all suspect Mick of bashing in his
wife’s skull and disguising the crime as an auto accident. What
revelations might come to light when her bones are unearthed?
Because this is a McDonagh play, a juicy mystery
like that is only a bit of misdirection for the real subject at hand:
Ireland’s relentless
appetite for self-destruction. The playwright both relishes and loathes
these rubberneckers with small, sour lives who feed on other people’s
misfortune like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Maryjohnny, sharing a glass
with Mick in his dank, spartan cottage, rants about the schoolchildren
who called her “a fat oul biddy.” Mick: “That was 27
years ago.”
Director Stuart Rogers’ production is terrifically entertaining,
and the cast works McDonagh’s deadpan rhythms masterfully. Higgins
may have the most watchable face in all of Los Angeles theater, and McGivney’s
Mairtin operates with a kind of giddy comic logic that recalls Harpo
Marx. The show also features one of the more ingenious set designs you’re
likely to see this season, courtesy of Jeff McLaughlin.
Morlan Higgins
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1/26/09
VARIETY
By Bob Verini
Theater Tribe
in North Hollywood has done a smashing job on Martin McDonagh's "A
Skull in Connemara" -- appropriately enough, since smashing heads
(both living and dead varieties) is one of its principal occupations.
Stuart Rogers' Los Angeles premiere production is superbly
acted and peerlessly funny, though McDonagh's distinctive blend of J.M. Synge's
warmth and Quentin Tarantino's heartlessness may prove too wayward for
delicate tastes.
McDonagh is capable of propulsive action, as this
year's Oscar-nominated "In
Bruges" and the Taper's forthcoming "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" attest.
But "Skull" is one of his mood pieces,
set in a remote Galway community of mean concerns and meaner temperaments.
His garrulous, digressive loafers and biddies swig back rotgut poteen
and sink into bleary oblivion as they hash over old grievances.
Call it a bad-mood piece, then. But it's darlin' all the same.
Scandal du jour is the long-ago death of Oona Dowd, ruled a drunken-driving
accident for which husband Mick (Morlan Higgins) has served his time.
Mick's annual job is to dig up and dispose of old bones to make room
for new. (Even the graveyard is an underachiever.) And now that Oona's
plot is scheduled for rotation, as it were, tongues are wagging: Was
her skull bashed in before the car crashed?
Constable Thomas Hanlon (John K. Linton) -- besotted by American TV
detectives solving cold cases -- thinks so. So does his granny Maryjohnny
(Jenny O'Hara), though she's more obsessed with cheating at church bingo
and consigning to hell the kids she caught doin' a wee in the churchyard.
(They were only 5 and it was 27 years ago, but it's the principle of
the thing.)
And Thomas' thick younger brother Mairtin (Jeff Kerr McGivney) doesn't
think much of anything, though his loose tongue and penchant for mischief
are the catalysts for chaos when it's time to smash the exhumed remains
into powder, with Oona's remains gone missing. (Kudos to Gray Creasy
for dem bones, by the way.)
The Irish accents are impeccable, but accents are easy. Attitude is
what's hard, and Rogers has captured McDonagh's desired tone at every
juncture. The characters jaw about nonsense until an insult is unveiled
or a plot twist inadvertently revealed, at which point we have to be
struck by our new awareness even while the everyday banter goes on.
To swing crazily from blue funk to red-hot savagery is a helmer's dream
opportunity, and Rogers' quartet accomplishes each reversal with consummate
finesse. Linton and McGivney perfectly capture the cats-in-a-sack tussle
of mismatched brothers, and O'Hara is unimprovable, her face ever squinching
up in delight or suspicion.
Mick is the tallest order: a stolid good ol' fella haunted by the past
but very much of the present, required to keep us guessing as to his
motives and intentions. Higgins conveys the man's deepest brooding while
carrying out his assigned tasks with a bit o' fun. As the drink goes
to everyone's heads and his little cottage becomes a shambles, he is
the strong, still figure from which our eyes dare not move. It's a sensational
performance.
Sensational, too, is the scene-two transformation of hut into cemetery,
a coup by designer Jeff McLaughlin and lighting man Luke Moyer. And Thadeus
Frazier-Reed nails every sound effect, from insistent crickets to the
subtle snap of a still-hairy skull as it's detached from an ancient neck.
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2/5/09
LA WEEKLY
GO!
By Amy Nicholson
Playwright Martin McDonagh -- a four
time Tony nominee is known for his rhythmic, ungrammatical dialogue and
a worldview that's comic, unsparing and just. He sets his plays in Irish
villages so small and overgrown with past grievances that neighbors remember
27-year-old slights that didn't even involve them. Here, a part time gravedigger
named Mick (Morlan Higgins) and his sop-headed assistant, Mairtin (Jeff
Kerr McGivney), are assigned to disinter the bones of Mick's wife, dead
of a car crash officially, but the bored locals, like old widow Maryjohnny
(Jenny O'Hara) and Thomas the cop (John K. Linton), have long whispered
how she was murdered by her husband. Under Stuart Rogers' measured direction,
Higgins feels capable of dismissive violence -- say, flinging hooch in
Mairtin's eyes -- but we're reluctant to see the killer that could be hibernating
within his bearish frame. Instead of plumbing the comedy's bleak cruelty,
the production plays like a cynical -- and highly watchable -- Sherlock
Holmes story; the focus is on the villagers' thick webs of past and present
tension, which spins itself into an obsession with fairness where characters
glower," Now I have to turn me vague
insinuations into something more of an insult, so then we'll all be quits." Jeff
McLaughlin's fantastic pull down set converts from a living room to a cemetery,
with grave pits as deep as Higgin's thighs are thick.
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1/29/09
BACKSTAGE
WEST
By Madeleine Shaner
The secret of writing an Irish play is to learn the touch points of
the great Irish plays of the past, get the colorful lingo down pat, then
reproduce them in convincing, slightly updated versions. Playwright Martin
McDonagh, born in London, the son of expatriate Irish parents, learned
the lessons well. There's a very slight story line in this play, dependent
on a village rumor that Mick Dowd (the wondrous Morlan Higgins), the
town gravedigger, whose current job is to dig up old bones and dispose
of them to make room for more-recent corpses, has a problem: He never
will dig in the corner where his wife's body is buried.
In a town where the only amusements are Bingo, Poteen, public drunkenness,
argumentation, and rumor, false logic suggests Mick must have been responsible
for his wife's death seven years earlier. Maryjonny Rafferty (a superbly
crusty Jenny O'Hara) doesn't want to believe Mick did his wife in by
driving his car into a wall, but it's such a juicy story that her spare
time is well-spent supping Mick's Poteen and sharing insults about everybody
in town. Mairton Hanlon (Jeff Kerr McGivney), whose vestige of a brain
gyrates in peculiar ways, works with, for, and against Mick in alternating
patterns and hasn't much in the way of common sense but will argue all
sides of any point -- drunk, drunker, bleeding from the head, or passed
out. The drunk-with-authority Garda (John K. Linton), in a fittingly
holier-than-thou performance, fails to make his case against Dowd.
Director Stuart Rogers does fine work; Jeff McLaughlin's graveyard set
and macabre bone-smashing headquarters are suitably creepy. The dramatic
authority is with Higgins, who goes above and beyond as the sad, lost,
angry gravedigger, but all the performances are superb, even if you don't
catch all the language, except the preponderance of the feck word in
all its tenses and declensions.
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1/25/09
CurtainUp.com
By Cynthia Citron
Morlan Higgins ought to be a household
name. The fact that he isn’t
is a complete puzzlement to me. He was my pick for Best Actor of 2004
for his riveting performance in playwright Athol Fugard’s Exits
and Entrances at the Fountain Theatre where he also starred in Victory
and After the Fall, and played Rabbi Stephen Wise in Accomplices. He’s
won a number of local awards, but he’s never won a Tony. And he
doesn’t do movies. it was therefore with great anticipation that
I went to see him star in Theatre Tribe’s production of A Skull
In Connemara, a black comedy that premiered in Galway, Ireland, in London
in 1997 and in New York in 2001. And, true to expectations, he was absolutely
marvelous!
Higgins, heading a flawless cast
of four, plays
Mick Dowd, an Irish grave digger whose grizzly task it is to dig up
the remains of the people he had buried seven years earlier in order
to make room for new bodies. (After seven years in the earth, apparently,
there is nothing left but skulls and bones.) He is joined in this task
by a young reprobate, Mairtin Hanlon (Jeff Kerr McGivney), a mischief
maker whose pranks are more often mean-spirited and menacing than comic.
(He is known thereabouts for the time he cooked a hamster.) Dowd is
also joined in his perpetual bouts with hard liquor by Mairtin’s feisty grandmother, Maryjohnny Rafferty
(Jenny O’Hara), an argumentative old crone who only has bad news
to discuss.
The fourth member of this idiosyncratic quartet
is Thomas Hanlon (John K. Linton), Mairtin’s brother. Thomas
is a local policeman who fancies himself a big-time detective on the
order of Quincy.
As the play begins, Mick Dowd is preparing himself
for the gruesome task of digging up the remains of his wife. Which
prompts the others to raise the question once again of his role in
her death. Was it really an accident, as he has claimed all these years?
Further, does he "snip
off the willies" of the dead men before he buries them? And what
does he do with the bones of the dead after he digs them up?
Believe it or not, A Skull in
Connemara is a very funny play. Of course, anything sounds funnier when it is delivered
with a rich Irish brogue, and all four of these players are experts
in that regard. But the proof of the pudding is in the writing, and
playwright Martin McDonagh has already proven himself to be one of
England and Ireland’s most
accomplished young writers. His play The Beauty Queen of Leenane won
four Tonys, The Lieutenant of Inishmore won an Olivier Award (the British
equivalent of the Tony) in 2003, and The Pillowman won both an Olivier
Award in 2004 and was nominated for a Tony for Best Play in 2005. This
year his film In Bruges is up for an Academy Award and his The Cripple
of Inishman is a big hit at New York's Atlantic Theater.
Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons to
see this play is to watch in astonishment as Mick Dowd’s dreary cabin is transformed in mere
seconds to a dismal graveyard, complete with open graves filled with
dirt, skulls and bones, and piles of gray rocks. Jeff McLaughlin, who
designed the set, pulls off a minor miracle right before your eyes. He
is aided in this task by the dramatic lighting provided by Luke Moyer
and the impeccable timing of Director Stuart Rogers, whose capable hand
puts the actors through their merry paces without a moment’s delay.
Kudos must also go to Sound Designer Thadeus Frazier-Reed for the choices
of Irish folk songs that embellish the play, and to Costume Designer
Thomas Burr, who deals very well with grunge.
I can’t recommend this play more heartily.
If I could, I would most defintely buy tickets for all of you! Editor's
Note: This is the middle play of McDonagh's Leenane trilogy, The Beauty
Queen of Leenane , generally viewed the trilogy's finest, arrived first
in 1998 — moving
from Off-Broadway to Broadway after creating a major stir — and
The Lonesome West opened on Broadway in 2001.
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2/3/09
EdgeLosAngeles.com
By Obed Medina
The Los Angeles premiere of Martin
McDonagh’s A
Skull in Connemara is not exactly for the passive theatergoer-especially
if they’re sitting in the first row. McDonagh’s middle play
of his Leenane trilogy (which begins with "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and
concludes with "The Lonesome West") is stocked with the playwright’s
dark comic sensibility that ends in a hilarious display of bloody violence.
(McDonagh’s name, by the way, may sound familiar - he was recently
Oscar nominated for his script to the black comedy "In Bruges" for
Best Original Screenplay.)
Mick Dowd (Morland
Higgins) is a widower whose main job in town is to dig up the bones
of bodies buried seven years ago to make room for new ones. His assistant,
the dim witted Mairtin (Jeff Kerr McGivney) sets the plot in motion
when he comes hints at allegations of rumors surrounding Dowd and the
circumstances behind his wife’s
death seven years ago. To complicate matters, Dowd is to dig up his wife’s
bones. Mick insists he’s not a murderer but Mairtin’s granny,
Maryjohnny (Jenny O’Hara), demands he tell the truth. Rounding
out the townsfolk is aspiring wannabe detective (by way of Quincy), Thomas
(John K. Linton) who goes to major extremes to get a confession out of
Dowd.
McDonagh’s
play fits nicely in Theatre Tribe’s mission to
produce intimate productions with small casts. Yet the production proves
more ambitious than most produced in this studio theater, most memorably
when Dowd’s Spartan home is seamlessly transformed into cemetery,
complete with fresh dirt. This awe-inspiring feat is the work of set
designer Jeff McLaughlin and lighting designer Luke Moyer. Later on,
in Act II, the tag line "A bone crushing dark fecking comedy" comes
into play as skulls are smashed and sent flying into the first row (much
the same way the dirt did in Act I.)
Stuart Roger’s
direction is equally impressive, maintaining a perfect balance between
colloquial language that propels the story forward and the cringing
inducing humor interlaced throughout the play. Not once does this production
play up the violence and dark comedy for mere laughs. Instead, the
performances of the actors emerge effortlessly from the circumstances
of their characters. Though there isn’t much in the
way of character study or deep and reflective speeches, Higgins delivers
a powerful performance as a widower forced to fend off these accusations
while maintaining a stone face façade. O’Hara’s gossipmonger
of an old crone is dead-on hilarious. Linton and McGivney convincingly
play off each other as brothers prone to violence than brotherly love.
This production of "A Skull in Connemara" is so well crafted,
it’s the next best thing to being in Ireland, complete with music
by Flogging Molly and The Pogues. It’s a treat to welcome this
play to the West Coast in this fashionb-bjust be warned-watch out for
the dirt and skull fragments.
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1/30/09
OMVELOPE
By Sea Glassman
I'm a Celtophile, I admit it. All things Irish, Welsh,
Scottish, - anything with a water logged twang and a colorful bit
of blood and bone, and I'll have it. So it's no wonder I ran to
the opening night of Martin McDonagh's hilarious exercise in a peculiar brand
of Irish love story and/or murder mystery, "A Skull in Connemara," delicately
directed with a cherishing hand by Stuart Rogers at the Theatre Tribe's
fine wee haunts in NoHo. Why I would call such a dust flying, bone crunching,
shouting match of skullduggery a triumph or a love story is a many tiered
tale of masterful writing, directing, acting and production, each tier successfully
revealing a wicked love of theater craft.
It's September and Mick Dowd, a gravedigger and undigger of sorts,
is put upon to dig out the bodies from coffins in the graves to
make room in the cemetery for the newly dead, and this year comes
the time when he must dig up his own wife's grave, now dead these
seven years. Along with that grisly task come doubts about how that
particular Skull in Connemara met her end, including murderous aspersions thrown
at Mick by those near and dear to him, or not. That is the playing field
upon which McDonagh's four fruity characters interact.
The writing belies the playwright's adoration of the nuanced and
intimate dialogue between old friends and relatives that is the
mark of most Celtic literature (think Dylan Thomas, or James
Joyce for example), especially the plays, and one can feel from the witty
jousting a love of written craft that is the basis for the success of this
production as a whole. Here in Lala Land, we call it a character driven story,
one shaped by the quirks and madness of each peculiar character, and the
ensuing twists and turns of the relationships and situations that only they
could inhabit or create. The woebegotten foursome in Skull is no exception,
and they bounce off of each other in a way that only they can.
With Martin McDonagh in line for an Oscar for his screenplay 'In Brueges,'
it's no surprise that the playwright loves to hear his characters dialogue.
The back and forth is pithy and dangerous, yet set into the habit of inveterate
comraderie. All the characters know each other deeply - are related even,
and yet none is sure of what loyalty or betrayal any of them is capable at
any given moment.
The play is lovingly and generously shaped by the hand of Director
Stuart Rogers, who humbly set about placing a small play in a smaller
space with such aplomb that you forget you're in a 38 seat theater looking
at a college dorm room size stage that is somehow made artful and gigantic.
Mr. Rogers obviously loves to direct. I don't know how else to say it.
He has full trust in his vision and his actors, who rise to the occasion of
his encouragement only to one up each other in show stealing, line by
line, throughout the entire play.
The acting is another tier on which the mastery of theatre is evident.
I don't want to spin the yarn of the play here, but at the outset,
Morlan Higgins, a dyed in the wool actor in Welsh and Irish thee-ay-ter
(having taken a turn as Dylan in the award winning 'Dylan' for example)
is the solid backbone of the cast as Mick Dowd. By turns straight man and
instigator, he is the serious mark who ballasts the weight of each newly appearing
provocateur. The character is never left alone and you somehow know he
wouldn't survive if he were. Still, he is dangerous enough for us to
wonder if he loved his wife or killed her, or both. He proves a
particularly adept physical comedian in Act Two when his Mick Dowd
curls up on the floor with a bag of bones as his pillow to deliver
a diatribe on how to avoid drowning in your own sick after a night
of the drink. He manages to do this with such a modicum of adorableness
and hilarity that you find yourself not minding the disgusting
subject matter, and that is essentially what goes on throughout A Skull
in Connemara with the lot of them. These actors so cheekily inhabit their
quirks and crazinesses, you'd think Connemara was the only place that existed
on earth as you sit in your little red seat. I found myself wanting to create
little Skull in Connemara dolls to go home with, or maybe that's just me.
No matter, every actor here stands out.
With every back and forth, Jenny O'Hara's wry and squinty eyed
comforter cum questioner, Maryjohnny Rafferty, delights when she
comes for her daily dose of drink at Mick's. Then, enter her brash,
marble missing grandson, Mairton Hanlon with the unwelcome news
that the undigging must begin with the patch of ground near Mick's dearly departed,
though he can barely keep the bit of information in his wee skull. Jeff
Kerr McGivney imbues his wacky Mairton with a tender form of bold and nutty
retardation shot through with brilliance that makes a riveting combination.
It's hard to take your eyes off his slouchy rock star behavior. Mairton
has a kind of "Look! A balloon!" quality, and I quote the actor
here, that keeps him an innocent, yet he possesses more knowledge
than one would think.
Come the second act, the artistry of a few more enter the scene. Not
to be forgotten is set designer Jeff McLaughlin's transformative set, which
literally made the audience gasp as Mick's First Act hovel shifted to the
Second Act cemetery in one fell swoop. Lit breathtakingly by Luke Moyer, beams
of moonlight eerily splay helter skelter all over the tilted graveyard. The
dust from Mick's dirt flinging as he undigs the graves and collects the bones
from opened coffins rises into the shafts of light, making for a mystical,
foggy feel to the proceedings, creepily enhancing the mystery of how Mick's
wife may have died. Add to this physical confusion the smoke from the cigarette
of the excitable Police Officer Thomas Hanlon, who presides over the undigging
in a lawful manner, seeing to it that no funny business comes of a husband
digging up his own wife's bones. Played with impetuous hilarity and fervent
righteousness by John Linton, who brings such a freshness and boldness to
the stage, Officer Hanlon's appearance ups the ante and tightens the screws.
By turns laid back and ready to pounce, Linton's Hanlon is a time bomb of
funny reactions, incriminations and apologies, set to go off on a moment
by moment basis. Really, the cast is perfect.
A huge shout out goes to the Bone Artist, aptly named Gray Creasy,
who surely had his task cut out for him, as there are as many bones
on stage as in the actors' bodies. Kerrie Blaisdell does as fine
a job as could be wished for from a dialect coach, with nary a blemish
on the intonations and incantations of Connemaran from the four American
actors.
I won't ruin the mystery by telling the tale in detail, but sure,
there's yelling and violence and blood and banging and incriminations,
like. Sure, if you sit in the front row, you may have dirt in your
eye, smoke up your nose, or bones at your feet, like. But, now, you wouldn't
let a little fecking ting like that feckin' stop you, would you, like?
If so, you may's well stay home and be a "wussy little pussy",
yourself. Pardon the aspersions.
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