Martin McDonagh is as hot as playwrights get. The 40-year-old Irishman’s most recent play, “A Behanding in Spokane”, premiered on Broadway last spring with a cast that included Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Anthony Mackie, and his screenplay for the 2008 film “In Bruges”, which he also directed, snagged him an Academy Award. He wasn’t yet 30 when he became the first scribe to have productions of four of his plays running simultaneously in London since William Shakespeare had done it four centuries earlier.
| On stage |
| ‘The Cripple of Inishmaan’ |
| » Where: Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater |
| » When: Through Saturday |
| » Info: $25 to $69; kennedy-center.org |
D.C. has hosted strong local productions of McDonagh’s morbid, mordantly funny work before. But the version of McDonagh’s 1997 black comedy “The Cripple of Inishmaan” at the Kennedy Center this week is the first chance D.C. playgoers have had to see his work interpreted by the theater artist who discovered him.
More than 15 years have passed since Garry Hynes, artistic director of Galway, Ireland’s Druid Theatre company, read a then-unknown and unproduced McDonagh’s draft of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and immediately recognized that a unique and authoritative new voice had arrived. Druid staged “Leenane” in 1996. A subsequent Hynes-helmed production of the show played a three-month off-Broadway engagement at New York City’s Atlantic Theater Company in 2009.
It’s that version that’s now in the midst of a five-month, 21-city tour of the United States and Ireland — the longest by an Irish theater troupe in decades, Druid claims.
The play examines the effect on a tiny, remote Irish town when filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty and his crew invade to shoot “Man of Aran,” a real film from 1934 that disguised fiction as documentary decades before fake-documentaries became a familiar genre.
Smith, who has worked with Druid for nine years, says the qualities that brand the production as unmistakably made-in-Galway even to audiences seeing it in the United Kingdom or United States are twofold. One of them is an intensity of focus. “When [artists] come to Galway, they generally come from London or Dublin or wherever they live, they’re leaving their homes behind. So when they’re with us in the rehearsal room, which is by the sea on the west coast of Ireland, there are no distractions,” he says. “It’s all about the work.”
The tour will wrap up in June in Inishmaan, an island off the west coast of Ireland with a population of 160. It’s venue there will be the hall of Inishmaan, the actual locale where a scene in the play’s second act is set. “We’ll be doing ‘The Cripple of Inishmaan’ in the Hall of Inishmaan for the people of Inishmaan,” Smith laughs. “It should be quite electric.”
