Allen Community College’s excellently cast staging of Martin McDonagh’s pitch-black comedy “The Cripple of Inishmaan” is able to wring from the fast-paced script the same quotient of wit and deep feeling that made the play a hit when it first arrived on the London stage in 1996.
The story trains its eye on 19-year-old Billy Claven, a physically disabled orphan living with two loving but tedious old sisters in the Aran Islands in 1934. Desperate to escape his barren seaside village and the casual cruelties meted out by his thick-witted neighbors, who are forever turning Billy’s visible agonies into a target for their fun, the wistful Billy hears rumor of a Hollywood crew arrived on a neighboring island to film a documentary. The hobbled boy sees in the crew’s arrival a chance to escape his nowhere town and the opportunity to replace his emotional isolation with the permanent, if superficial, recognition offered by film.
Up until Billy’s chance encounter with the movies, the woe-struck teen’s consolations on that weather-beaten strip of western Ireland are two: reading and staring at cows. Surprisingly, these are hobbies that do little to endear him to his cloddish neighbors, whose barbs are — in McDonagh’s subtle and witty script — barely veiled projections of their own frustrations at a fate that has trapped them, too, on this forgotten speck of land in the north Atlantic, staring into a glum future.
For a role that demands a range of feeling — not to mention the enforced partial paralysis of his two left limbs — Jason Davis delivers a subtle, mature performance as Cripple Billy.
Rachel Mentzer and Angel Spencer play the tenderly wrought sisters, Kate and Eileen, restoring to the play’s antic, often bawdy, dramatis personae a measure of sanity.
Helen, the beautiful, foul-mouthed, flirtatious young woman of the village — and the far-fetched object of Billy’s ardor — is played by Emily Pierce, whose performance as one of Cripple Billy’s chief tormentors vibrates with a delicious malice (but, like all of McDonagh’s characters — each one nursing his or her own private pain — even in Helen’s case, a splinter of light shines through).
Helen’s brother, Bartley — whose attention in life is consumed by a mere three things: candy, telescopes and America — is played with irrepressible charm by the perfectly cast Layne Gonzalez, who lends a shaggy-haired innocence to the scenes with his short-tempered sister.
One of the main joys of the show is Justin Appleton’s performance as Johnnypateenmike, the insalubrious town gossip, who fancies himself a “newsman” and shuffles from scene to scene, pressing his nose into others’ business in search of a small-town scoop. Appleton’s Johnny Pat is a shambolic, easily-offended, booze-soaked Brendan Behan-like figure, whose vast moral lapses are periodically redeemed by glimpses of an actual, if submerged, capacity for deep kindness.
In distinguishing the English theater from the Irish, the late critic Kenneth Tynan once observed: “The English hoard words like misers; the Irish spend them like sailors.” In the event that bits of McDonagh’s Irish dialogue whiz past audience ears ungrasped, the theatre department has included in the program a glossary of Irish expressions — warning play-goers that “gob” means “face,” “gasur” means “a youth,” “bollocks” means “testicles,” and “poteen” refers to “a whiskey mash.”
Tickets to ACC’s funny and moving “The Cripple of Inishmaan” are $6 for adults, $4 for students and free for Allen students with an I.D. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. and runs Dec. Tonight, Friday and Saturday.
Allen actors shine in Irish dramedy
