Theater Review: Actors shine, but find little to mine in ‘Lonesome West’

By Joseph Hurley

THE LONESOME WEST, by Martin McDonagh. Directed by Garry Hynes. Featuring Dawn Bradfield, David Ganly, Brian F. O’Byrne and M’liosa Stafford. At the Lyceum Theatre.

Dogs bark from time to time outside the miserable County Galway cottage in which two Irish brothers, Valene and Coleman Connor, live out their lives in a state of constant armed hostility. Long, undulating waves of dense mist fall through most of the evening in the magnificent rain curtain that is a prominent feature of Francis O’Connor’s eloquently drab stage design.

We are, of course, back in Leenane, the dreary little hamlet in the West of Ireland that the Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh seems to be creating in the image of such low-rent American stage "classics" as "Tobacco Road" and "God’s Little Acre," where murder and suicide are mundane events, and anything resembling normal human affection is in exceedingly short supply.

That, at least, is the impression given by the two segments of the youthful playwright’s "Leenane Trilogy" thus far seen in New York, starting with last season’s "Beauty Queen of Leenane," and now reinforced by "The Lonesome West," recently opened at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.

"The Lonesome West" is apparently the final panel of McDonagh’s grubby triptych, with "A Skull in Connemara" being the as-yet-unseen middle event. "Unseen," that is, in the United States. All three plays toured Ireland in a package directed by Garry Hynes, co-founder of Galway’s Druid Theatre, where the work of the writer, still not quite 30, first took hold.

Despite those barking mutts and that graceful onstage rainfall, there doesn’t seem to be much viable life beyond the broken, jagged walls of the play’s distressed (and quite equally distressing) domicile, because, to be blunt about it, there’s not much real life inside, either.

McDonagh’s three Leenane plays are tightly interlocking, which is to say that the horrors taking place in one play are likely to be referred to, with as much affection as shock, in either or both of the others.

The battling Connor brothers live in a kind of domestic apartheid. Valene, who collects vast numbers of plastic religious statuettes and subscribes to what appears to be glossy women’s periodicals, has placed huge black "Vs" on objects all over the cottage, lest there be any confusion concerning their ownership.

Obsessively acquisitive by nature, Valene is riding high when we first encounter him, because the brothers’ unloved father has just succumbed to a gunshot wound inflicted by Coleman.

Coleman has, it soon becomes clear, dispatched his father as a result of an unflattering remark the older man made about his son’s hairstyle, and the price Valene has exacted in exchange for his silence is the transfer of Coleman’s inheritance, and, it seems, most of his world possessions, such as they are. The paternal slaying was, of course, no accident, but rather just another minor landmark on the bloody Leenane map.

(The coiffure insult is one of the stranger details in this rather peculiar production, since the actor playing Coleman, M’liosa Stafford, is nearly bald).

Designer O’Connor’s set, despite its flyaway upstage wall, is amazingly similar to the "Beauty Queen" cottage, the stove in the same place, the battered chairs and table placed in approximately the same position, and so forth.

In a subtle way, the tracing paper parallels uniting the two Leenane cottages throws a rather harsh light on the limitations built into dramatist McDonagh’s thinking and his writing. An actress who recently played Mag Folan, the central character in "Beauty Queen" in a regional production of the play, came away from the experience with the opinion that the young writer’s language is entirely self-conceived and resembles, if anything, German, with its verbs positioned at the end of its sentences .

"The Lonesome West," like "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," and, perhaps to a lesser extent, "The Cripple of Inishmaan," the playwright’s sole non-Leenane work yet produced locally, comes across as appallingly mean-spirited and, at the same time, relentlessly artificial, disconnected from anything resembling ordinary humanity, even remotely.

Toward the end of "Beauty Queen," the play’s seemingly passive combatant, Mag’s deranged spinster daughter, Maureen, after having briefly left the cottage, returns for her car keys, which she’s left on the table.

The idea that that character owned a car, and, indeed, that automotive transport existed at all in Leenane, came as something of a shock, so remote did the playwright’s world seem by that point, and so thoroughly adrift in some vague epoch did the whole venture appear to float.

More and more, McDonagh stands revealed as a writer who seems to detest the individuals who populate his plays, men and women he appears to have created at least partly in order to subject them to embittered ridicule. As does "Beauty Queen," "The Lonesome West" contains just four characters, two dominant and two more or less ancillary. In both instances, director Hynes has drawn flawless performances from her small company, one member of which, the excellent Brian F. O’Byrne, is present in both productions.

As Pat Dooley of "Beauty Queen," the young Cavan-born actor gave a performance of heartbreaking sensitivity, and while the artificiality which befogs "The Lonesome West" from start to finish limits his opportunities, he still manages to do admirable work, albeit more on a cartoon-like level, rather than coming up with a memorably human portrait.

O’Byrne’s Valene is prissy and compulsive, while Stafford’ s slouchy Coleman is a creature of slow reactions and deeply banked fires, but capable under stress of truly terrifying outbursts.

In the two smaller roles, David Ganly brings genuine compassion and feeling to the part of the misbegotten Father Welsh, a young priest in the process of losing his faith and acquiring a distinct taste for poitin.

The fourth role, Girleen Kelleher, the teenage daughter of the unseen proprietor of the poitin still, comes into the lives of the brothers, and of the priest, for whom she is developing a dangerous affection, mainly in the course of delivering her father’s products. Dawn Bradfield invests the part with an appealing combination of sweetness and worldliness, so deft in its effect that it’s virtually impossible to assign an age to the character with any degree of certainty.

So effective are both Ganly and Bradfield, in fact, that when the cottage set yields to a brief scene played out on a bench alongside an unseen lake, a body of water that will take on a tragic aspect toward the end of the play, "The Lonesome West" actually acquires a few moments of warmth and empathy, qualities absent elsewhere in the work.

Because their scenes together are so repetitious, treading the same acrimonious territory over and over, actors O’Byrne and Stafford suffer from a kind of mutual diminution, a lessening of effect, through no fault of their own.

There are laughs in "The Lonesome West," to be sure, and there may or may not be eager audiences willing to accept or perhaps overlook the inherent cruelty and shallowness of McDonagh’s play in order to harvest them. In all probability, however, there will be more audiences staggering away from the Lyceum Theatre feeling cheated, depressed, and perhaps even vaguely soiled.