Stephen Novelli as Mick Dowd and Jake Blouch as Mairtin--and skulls. Photo by Mark Garvin.
The Lantern Theatre Company’s production of “A Skull in Connemara,” is, to quote one of its quirky main characters “a great oul night. Drinking and driving and skull batterin’. . .”
In fact, if you happen to be in the first row, you might want to bring some protection—a la watermelon-smashing comic Gallagher—from the flying bone shards during the hilarious scene as two drunken Irish gravediggers with wooden mallets make sure that two skeletons do indeed return to dust.
In the second part of Martin McDonagh’s Leenane trilogy (“Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “The Lonesome West” bracket it), “A Skull in Connemara” tells the story of Mick Dowd (Stephen Novelli), who picks up the odd piece of change from the parish priest by digging up bodies in the church graveyard and disposing of them so there’ll be room for the newly dead. We arrive as Mick is within distance of the lovely bones of his wife, Oona, who died, we learn, as the result of a “drink driving” accident seven years earlier with the poitin-addled Mick at the wheel. He paid his debt in prison, but returned home to be haunted by the rumor that he’d murdered her and used the accident to cover it up.
Assisting Mick is a local young miscreant and dimbulb, Mairtin (Jake Blouch), whose granny MaryJohnny (Ellen Mulroney), likes to saunter down to Mick’s cottage after a successful night of Bingo for a sip of the good stuff that Mick has aplenty, trade a little gossip, and nurse old resentments (she still has it in for the boys who, as five-year-olds, went “wee” on the concecrated ground of the graveyard. And for the children who called her names: “When I see them burned in hell, that’s when I let bygones be bygones,” she tells Mick). The fourth character is her other grandson, the local garda Tommy (Jered McLenigan) who makes Barney Fife look like a candidate for Mensa. At one point, when Mick makes a comment about Tommy’s having seen plenty of dead bodies, the copper admits that he hasn’t. “I would like there to be dead bodies flying about everywhere, but there never is,” he says wistfully.
As in many Irish plays, there are horrifying moments tempered by humor. In this one, it’s death that loses its sting to hilarity, much of it physical. The skull batterin’ is done to music—an insipid tune on a 45 record by a female Irish popstar whom Mairtin admits to fantasizing about. And Mairtin’s other fantasies contribute to the laughs, as when he’s making two skulls kiss and one perform a sex act that we can’t describe here.
Jake Blouch as Mairtin occasionally loses his accent but never his comic timing. He brings such a wonderful childlike innocence to the character that it never occurs to you to wonder why you find this boy so adorable and funny even after he admits to cooking a live hamster in a microwave, wishing only that there had been a glass door so he actually could have seen what happened.
Stephen Novelli’s Mick is a finely nuanced character, acerbic as hell but nursing an inner turmoil that feeds the suspicion that his neighbors—particular the garda Tommy—are right about his wife’s death. Novelli hints at but doesn’t hit the audience over the head with the simmering violence inside him. Because he actually does hit someone else over the head, his guilt remains a question, but by the end you’re laughing so much it doesn’t really matter.
“A Skull in Connemara” is directed by M. Craig Getting and Kathryn MacMillan. The inventive set, which combines Mick’s home with the graveyard where he spends many minutes on stage digging into real dirt, is the work of scenic designer Dirk Durossette. And major props to the prop people on this production (Tim Martin is props designer). Every night, two plaster skeletons are smashed to smithereens and since the nearly sold-out play is extending its run through February 13, we figure that, including matinees, they’ve got more than 50 skeletons in their prop closet.
“A Skull in Connemara” is part of the Philadelphia Irish Theater Festival. Save 20 percent on tickets by ordering tickets to two or more plays at the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia website.
