The Lonesome West
By Martin McDonagh. Directed by Carmel O’Reilly. Set design by J. Michael Griggs. Lighting by Neil Anderson. Costumes by Sarah Chapman. Sound by Julie Pittman. Fight choreographer Robert Walsh. With Colin Hamell, Barlow Adamson, Billy Meleady, and Bethany Ann McDonald. Presented by Súgán Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through November 24.

" Nobody’ll notice a biteen more hate, so, if there’s plenty enough hate in the world, " remarks Valene Connor, the less despicable of the two feuding brothers in Martin McDonagh’s The Lonesome West. Certainly McDonagh, the West-of-Ireland-by-way-of-South-London author of a half dozen plays including The Cripple of Inishmaan and the Tony-winning The Beauty Queen of Leenane, has racked up enough corrosively comic hate to get himself noticed in the world. No less than Robert Brustein has declared that this playwright is " destined to be one of the theatrical luminaries of the 21st century. " But The Lonesome West, which is getting its Boston premiere in a crackling if effectively rain-sodden production by Súgán Theatre Company, proves itself a lesser sibling to The Beauty Queen of Leenane, with which it shares an address.

That address, of course, is about as far from Grover’s Corners as you can get. McDonagh’s plays are set in the bleak, tangled west of Ireland (or off its west coast, in the Aran Islands), in a meanly accoutered, mean-spirited world where cold comfort is the Catholic Church and the only cultural referent is ancient American television. The characters are trapped there, living " in each other’s pockets, " and their bilious, profane interaction, rendered in lilting rhythms reminiscent of Synge’s, can be both shocking and hilarious. In the case of The Lonesome West, a play Sam Shepard might have written if he’d been raised by wolves, the combatant-coconspirators are two adult brothers, one of whom has just shot their father in the head for criticizing his hairdo. These two appear to have been born to a deep mutual enmity that is the primary activity of their lives — lives in which the vicious argument is both cyclical and trivial, with equal weight given to murder, insult, and the destruction of potato chips.

The trouble is that, unlike The Beauty Queen of Leenane, whose mother-daughter dance of loathing leads to a crime at once awful and inevitable, The Lonesome West goes nowhere. There is a young, alcoholic priest sunk in despair at the petty amorality of his parishioners in general and of the brothers in particular. And there’s a tough, pretty, door-to-door salesman of her father’s poteen (privately distilled whiskey) called Girleen. Her ripe, taunting presence calls attention to the sexual-loserhood of the brothers, one of whom arouses the other’s ire by calling him a " virgin fecking gayboy who couldn’t pay a drunken monkey to go interfering with him. "

That’s the way things proceed here, brute Coleman asserting that tightwad Valene would " steal the shite out of a burning pig " and Valene keeping a close eye on the paltry possessions — among them a looming orange stove he treats like some holy grail — that Coleman’s not allowed to touch. The two are forever at each other’s throats, brandishing kitchen knives or loaded shotguns, in an infantile duel that again and again comes to a murderous head that’s more or less a tease. A scene in which the brothers try making up as a tribute to the priest, competitively confessing a lifetime of sins ranging from spit in the eye to cutting the ears off a dog, can be read as a dig against the Catholic ritual of confession and absolution. But, more often, McDonagh seems to be spinning his audaciously nasty, verbally colorful wheels.

The Súgán production, however, is as sordid as dirty sheets and as jolting as Irish moonshine. Director Carmel O’Reilly shies from neither McDonagh’s black humor nor his cruel worldview. J. Michael Griggs supplies an appropriately dank hearth, though there’s hardly room there for the elaborate collection of saintly figurines Valene collects in the hope their sheer number will get him into Heaven. The raging scuffles engineered by fight director Robert Walsh are suspenseful and farcical at once — and convincing even at close range. And the broad accents essential to McDonagh’s rhythms are well-managed.

Barlow Adamson makes a sad, sweet fall guy of the plaintive, pickled priest — whose name everyone mangles when they’re not mangling one another. And Bethany Ann McDonald’s Girleen, though spiky enough to break up a fight with a sword-sized knife, beams a quite-natural vulnerability. As for McDonagh’s lethal-sibling odd couple, Colin Hamell, effectively dense as the greasy-haired, gobbling Coleman, is the Oscar Madison of the piece. The impish Billy Meleady, in whose figurine-buffing Valene there is yet a shard of suffering humanity, is its Felix Unger.

Issue Date: November 8-15, 2001

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