Little flesh on these dramatic bones
A Skull in Connemara is the middle play in Martin McDonagh's Leenane trilogy, and Lantern Theater provides a rare opportunity to see this work by Ireland's hottest young playwright/filmmaker.
A Skull in Connemara
is the middle play in Martin McDonagh's Leenane trilogy, and Lantern Theater provides a rare opportunity to see this work by Ireland's hottest young playwright/filmmaker.
The play's events take place in a tiny town in rural Ireland full of mean people and bad behavior, where the cemetery is so small that every seven years the dead are dug up and the graves are emptied to make room for the next corpses.
The question is, what happens to the bones? Dust to dust, and never mind the metaphors; McDonagh is a great literalizer. There is a lot of bone-bashing in the course of the action, which should be shocking and grisly, but, unfortunately, isn't.
Mick (Stephen Novelli) does the digging, helped by dopey badboy Mairtin (the excellent Jake Blouch). Kibitzing (or the Irish equivalent, which seems to be "casting aspersions") is Maryjohnny, a malicious old bingo-playing lady (Ellen Mulroney, who is the cast's weak link), and Mairtin's older brother, the self-important cop, Thomas (Jered McLenigan, who triumphantly creates both character and caricature).
This year it's time for Mick's late wife, Oona - who died when he drove into a wall while drunk - to be exhumed.
As in The Pillowman, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and The Cripple of Inishmaan and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and his movie In Bruges, McDonagh's signature is gruesome hilarity, a macabre weirdness that makes you gasp and laugh at the same time.
The ingredients are all there in Skull, but somehow it is neither funny enough nor horrific enough. The pacing feels wrong, too slow and labored, while the dialogue's endless repetitions are tedious instead of comical.
Maybe two directors - M. Craig Getting and Kathryn MacMillan - are too many. The last 15 minutes of the show finally find the turbulence and the farce, but we've waited too long to get there.
Although there are, literally, skulls in this play, the title is a quotation from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a line taken from Lucky's famous rant - " . . . the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara . . .. " And what contemporary playwright, especially an Irish one, doesn't need to acknowledge his/her debt to the master?
What both skulls have in common, besides Connemara, is that their meaning remains obscure. Alas! Poor Yorick!
A Skull in Connemara
Lantern Theater Company at St. Stephen's, 10th and Ludlow Streets. Extended through Feb. 13. Tickets: $10-$36. Information: 215-829-0395, www.lanterntheater.org or Irish Tix Mix at www.phillytheatretix.com.
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