Man of Aran

Scott Zigler on The Cripple of Inishmaan

by Scott T. Cummings

"Don't Call Your Wife Baby -- Oleanna 1994." So reads the inscription on the green baseball cap that Scott Zigler wears pulled down over his full head of bushy hair. It's a souvenir from his work a few years ago on David Mamet's controversial play about political correctness, sexual harassment, and the academy. Since then Zigler has been wearing a lot of hats, figuratively speaking, including those of director, teacher, administrator, literary director, company member, and father of an eight-month-old baby that does not sleep through the night. He needs a haircut and a couple nights' sleep -- but he's not complaining.

A co-founder and continuing member of Atlantic Theatre Company in New York, Zigler moved to the Boston area three years ago to join the artistic staff of the American Repertory Theatre as literary director of ART's New Stages program and associate director of the troupe's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. Two springs ago, he directed the ART world premiere and the subsequent Broadway production of Mamet's The Old Neighborhood, and it is in his capacity as stage director that I'm speaking to him in his script-strewn office at the Loeb Drama Center.

Zigler is at the helm of the ART's final Loeb show of the season, Martin McDonagh's comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan, which previews this weekend. The play takes place in 1934 on remote Inishmaan, one of the three rocky, windswept Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland near Galway. It is to these islands that the great Irish playwright John Millington Synge traveled in 1898, at the suggestion of poet W.B. Yeats, in order to get in touch with his Irish roots and the folkways of the people there. Since then, the Aran Islands have been a major landmark in the literary image of rural Ireland as the land of thatched cottages, peat fires, and sometimes a not-so-wee bit of poteen.

That image was furthered in 1932 when the Hollywood filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty came to the islands to make Man of Aran, a documentary about the heroic struggle of Irish fishermen. The presence of the American camera crew and the chance for selected locals to appear in the film provides the occasion for the action of The Cripple of Inishmaan, which centers on 17-year-old "Cripple Billy," who's been hobbled since birth and raised by two old aunts after his parents disappeared mysteriously at sea. The deceptively simple tale -- with its salt-of-the-earth characters, stage-Irish dialogue, and preoccupation with such daily trivia as whose goose bit whose cat -- seems on one level to be just another Irish peasant comedy à la Synge & Co.

Some even see it as a wicked parody of that tradition, but Zigler thinks something different is going on. "Its purpose is to parody only to the degree that the purpose of parody is to explode an assumption and reveal the truth through comic means. My sense of what McDonagh is doing is utilizing our assumptions about Irishness, the Irish storytelling tradition, and the Irish playwriting tradition to make us think one thing is going on and then to flip that completely and in a very modern way. There is this veneer of traditional Irishness, but underneath there is a modern darkness and a cynicism -- which I love, but that's just me."

How does McDonagh's cynicism manifest itself? "In his constant employment of the common day-to-day cruelty of human interaction," says Zigler. "There are moments in this play when you are devastated by how someone demonstrates a lack of compassion or just plain cruelty. I think that is what he is writing about in most of his plays. I think Beauty Queen is about the same thing and what the results of it are."

Zigler is referring to McDonagh's most successful play to date, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which recently finished a year-long, Tony-studded visit on Broadway after an equally successful run in London. It is the first play in McDonagh's Connemara trilogy, which also includes A Skull in Connemara and, currently playing on Broadway, The Lonesome West. At one point a couple years ago, all three plays plus The Cripple of Inishmaan were playing in London's West End, a remarkable achievement for any playwright this side of Shakespeare. By most standards, McDonagh is a rank beginner -- his professional debut came in February 1996 -- but he is also the hottest contemporary dramatist in the English-speaking theater. That's heady stuff for a not-yet-30 playwright born and raised in London by Irish working-class parents.

What accounts for McDonagh's meteoric rise? Is it simply the rage for all things Irish? Zigler finds in McDonagh a rarer virtue. "I think he is just a very good writer, and there are not very many new good writers. There is a quality of writing there that just doesn't come along that often and that goes beyond the Irishness and beyond the bad-boy image that he has cultivated in his interviews. It goes to storytelling, character development, use of language, which very few people writing today are doing as well as he is."

The Cripple of Inishmaan is at the American Repertory Theatre through June 13. Tickets are $23 to $55. Call 547-8300.