February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The program for Sean Cunningham’s musical play “God Hates the Irish: The Ballad of Armless Johnny,” quotes the New York Times as having referred to some item of the author’s previous work as being “in the best of bad taste.”
Whether the people who put together the program notes for the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater production of Cunningham’s new play were kidding, bragging, or just possibly issuing a well-intended warning to the unwary, is moot.
In any event, “God Hates the Irish” lands on the little stage on Waverly Place with an earnest, hard-working cast of six playing 17 roles with ceramic smiles, and, seemingly, not the slightest awareness of the depths into which they have plunged, dragging the audience along with them, laughing and howling, not necessarily in agony.
“God Hates the Irish,” could make a fairly potent claim to being the most foul-mouthed show ever done off-Broadway, so explicit, both sexually and verbally, as to make “O Calcutta” resemble “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”
To cite just one example, playwright Cunningham, serving as his own lyricist, manages to provide composer Michael Friedman with lines that rhyme “Charlie Mingus” with “cunnilingus.”
And it goes on from there, as though the goal of Cunningham’s endeavor, directed by Will Frears, who steered “Omnium Gatherum” from success at Louisville’s Human Festival to a brief run, last year, at Third Avenue’s recently disenfranchised Variety Arts Theater, were at least partly to gross out the audience as thoroughly and as deeply as possible.
When what it ostensibly architectured as social satire runs wildly off the rails, the results can be genuinely chaotic.
“God Hates the Irish” opens with a sturdy, rather boxlike young man addressing the audience directly and confidently, introducing himself in song and explaining his situation. He is known as Armless Johnny Kavanaugh, and his condition explains the boxiness of his appearance.
When his parents appear, like peasants out of some unimaginable Irish folk operetta, it is obvious that “Da” has only a single arm, his left, which motivates “Ma” to conclude that the family into which she has married has some severe genetic problems.
No one in the family in recent generations has been born with the requisite number of arms, although Johnny is apparently the first to have entered the world armless.
If the words “unarmed” or “disarmed” come to mind, it’s tempting to speculate that Cunningham and his colleagues have been perusing Dalton Trumbo’s celebrated antiwar novel, “Johnny Got His Gun ” in which a military hero returns from combat limbless.
But the possible parallel doesn’t prove out. Armless Johnny’s problems appear to be, as “Ma” suspected, genetic in nature.
There’s also a suggestion of Voltaire’s “Candide” in “God Hates the Irish.” Voltaire’s na