There's something downright homicidal in the damp atmosphere of Leenane. Martin McDonagh's trilogy of plays set in this isolated village on the west coast of Ireland is studded with murders, rumors of murders and suicides. McDonagh's characters seem to have an almost genetic predisposition to malevolence. Every other sentence is an insult and every third word a curse. Even the girls' under-12 soccer team is a pack of little thugs who win by sending their opponents to the emergency room. Leenane is a literally god-forsaken place -- as the parish priest says, "It seems like God has no jurisdiction in this town ... no jurisdiction at all."
Five years ago, McDonagh catapulted into the forefront of the new generation of Irish playwrights with his first play, "The Beauty Queen of Leenane". It won four Tony awards on Broadway and was given its regional premiere last season at TheaterWorks. Now that company is premiering "The Lonesome West", the third play in the Leenane trilogy (the middle work is "A Skull in Connemara"). McDonagh is an Irish writer born and bred in England. Raised in London by Irish parents, he spent his boyhood summers with relatives on the bleak western shores of Ireland. His perspective on the Ould Sod is therefore one of both affectionate intimacy and cool objectivity.
Like its predecessors in the Leenane trilogy, "The Lonesome West" is dark, disturbing and violent. This one, though, is also laugh- out-loud funny. Its antagonistic protagonists are two brothers, Valeen and Coleman, thirty-something bachelors who still act out their sibling rivalries like a pair of 12-year-olds. Valeen marks all his possessions with a big black V, which only incites Coleman to smash them up. In this terminally dysfunctional household, an argument over a bag of potato chips inevitably escalates into a fist-fight. And that's not all: As the play opens, Coleman has just blown his father's head off with a shotgun over an insult to his haircut.
The brothers' grimy cottage gets only two regular visitors. One is a pretty teenager called Girleen, who peddles her father's poteen (potato-based moonshine) door to door. The other is Father Welsh, a young priest so inept at his calling that his parishioners have trouble remembering his name correctly. While the others communicate primarily in derisive banter, Welsh masks his own loneliness and alienation in drunken self-pity.
Leenane is a town whose people lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation, and Rob Ruggiero's production for TheaterWorks strikes just the right balance between the play's rugged humor and its underlying despair. There are four good performances here -- two of them very good. The actors, aided by McDonagh's lively dialogue, make these rather unappealing characters not only sympathetic but even likeable.
Susan Pourfar is delightful as Girleen, a tough little firecracker in a miniskirt and Doc Marten boots. John Ahlin manages to be both preposterous and scary as Coleman -- a slow-witted slob with a volcanic temper. As Valeen, Colin Lane is amusingly fastidious, but takes that half a step too far, into an odd prissiness. And Joey Collins's Father Welsh is so unremittingly maudlin that he loses that self- deprecating edge that is the saving grace of the Irish drunk.
The title of "The Lonesome West" evokes the American frontier -- intentionally. It parodies the Wild West of the movies, where an insult is grounds for a gunfight; but it also reflects the grim desolation of an outpost far from civilization, where the incessant loneliness can breed eccentricity, slapstick violence, and self-destruction.
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