There
are, in great stories,
villains you love to hate, which I think also means rooting for the
cathartic
retribution they have coming to them. But then there are villains you
should
hate to love but don’t, because if they were missing, if they were
defeated
with no hope of return, the universe would be somehow diminished. And
it’s not
that Carmichael, the divine psychotic of Martin McDonaugh’s A Behanding in Spokane, is a master criminal
along the lines
of, well, The Master or The Joker or Moriarty; he is so decidedly small
time
that he wouldn't rate so much as a flicker of interest from a Doctor, a
Batman
or a Holmes—yet he is as wholly unique and memorable a creation,
inhabiting
a world that, though down and out, and presenting the illusion of
kitchen-sink
reality in its run-down hotel room setting (scrofulously deigned by Scott
Pask), is every bit as fanciful
as an
alternate universe. And as portrayed by Christopher Walken, Carmichael becomes one with the
idiosyncratic
actor, whose wryly offbeat—yet somehow never off-kilter or
mis-rhythmed—delivery frames a performance destined to become
legendary.
(I’m sorry, I have to say it: TV fanboy time: Those of you who saw John
[Life
on Mars: UK] Simm as The Master on the New Millennium Doctor
Who,
we’re talking about that level of
glorious
volatility, and that deliciousness of nuance.)
It’s
often said that insanity is merely sanity displaced, and that’s
Carmichael to a
T. A vigorous, 60ish and casually ruthless fellow, he is obsessed with
the
recovery of a hand that was severed from his arm by thugs when he was a
boy in
his native Spokane, Washington. Why is he so driven to reclaim it, all
these
decades later?
“Because
it’s mine.”
Of
course.
And
that’s why young, black street hustler Toby (Anthony Mackie) and his dimwitted white girlfriend
Marilyn (Zoe
Kazan) have made what may well
be the
ultimate mistake of their lives in trying to pass off an impostor hand
as the
real deal. Others have tried to dupe Carmichael before, and he's never
taken to
it without the most extreme measure of objection. At least so he
claims, and
the items in his suitcase would give you ample reason to believe him.
The
weird comings
and goings should bother Mervyn the hotel desk clerk (Sam Rockwell) but he's as caught up in his own
existential loop
as anyone, his philosphies of life as daffy (if not as potentially
deadly;
well, not on purpose) as Carmichael’s.
With
the minutest and rarest of exceptions, this play—the first by its Irish
scribe to be set (and likewise debuting) in the United States—captures
various rhythms of downbeat American colloq with wicked accuracy, and
the lines
are as bleakly and hysterically funny as any you’d be likely to hear
in, oh, I
don’t know, a Top Ten Bleakly Funny Plays Festival.
Under
the direction of John Crowley, the
intermissionless 90 minutes is taut, spare, suspenseful and, like its
dark
anti-hero, not a little insane. But you’ll buy in. And welcome sanity’s
all too
brief displacement…
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