When O'Casey Met Scorsese

By Richard Zoglin

Martin McDonagh sits cross-legged on a bed, giving a visiting journalist the only comfortable chair in the ill-furnished brownstone apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side that has been the playwright's home for the past two months. A TV set, perched uncertainly on a table in the corner, flickers soundlessly. When not at rehearsals, the London native has been giving himself a crash course in American TV. Tops on his list of discoveries: South Park and the fights on Jerry Springer.

It's a typical scene from the life of a struggling writer in New York City--except that McDonagh is hardly struggling anymore. Just turned 28, he has already caused a sensation in London, where four of his plays have been staged to wide acclaim in the past two years. One of them, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, opened off-Broadway in February (in the original production staged by London's Royal Court and Ireland's Druid Theatre) and drew such ecstatic reviews that its six-week run was sold out within 24 hours; the show will transfer to Broadway later this month. A second McDonagh play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, opens this week at the Public Theater, in a new production directed by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks. Friends warned McDonagh against trying to make his U.S. debut with a double splash, but he dismisses the concerns with a smile that could be read either as naivete or arrogance: "I like the bigness of having two plays here. It's the pizazz. The Muhammad Ali thing."

McDonagh may or may not be the greatest, but he is certainly the freshest, most confident new voice in the theater to come along in years. Beauty Queen, part of a trilogy set in the western Irish county of Galway, is a dark, beautifully crafted comedy-drama about the spiteful relationship between a fortyish spinster and her aged, acid-tongued mother, who thwarts the daughter's one chance at love. What makes the play so startling is its mix of old-fashioned dramaturgy--the plot hinges on an undelivered letter--and the chilling, unsentimental way in which it shows the casual cruelty people wield against each other. This is a play in which a daughter slams her mum's hand onto a hot stove and scarcely bats an eye.

With The Cripple of Inishmaan--part of a separate trilogy set in rural Ireland--McDonagh expands his palette; the play has more characters, a richer story line and, at least in Zaks' production, more comedy. The bored residents of an island off the west coast of Ireland are in a tizzy when a Hollywood director, Robert Flaherty, arrives to film the documentary Man of Aran. Billy, the cripple of the title (Ruaidhri Conroy, who played the role in London), is deluded enough to think he might get a part in the movie. Or maybe not so deluded. The plot is layered with deceptions that reveal the desperation of these small-minded characters. If it lacks the freezing perfection of Beauty Queen, Cripple is still a work of surprises and unexpected depths.

What is most surprising--and, to some critics, bothersome--about McDonagh is that he has never lived in the country he writes about so vividly. His Irish parents moved to London before he was born, and he visited Ireland only for summer holidays. His parents moved back a few years ago, leaving Martin and his brother to share the South London house where they grew up. McDonagh bridles gently at the notion that he's unfit to follow in the tradition of Sean O'Casey and John Millington Synge--that "with an accent like mine you can't write Irish plays. I'm a storyteller. I believe in making things up."

McDonagh dropped out of school at age 16 and spent five years getting radio and TV scripts rejected before two of his short radio plays were produced in Australia. He turned to theater largely because he thought he could do better than the "really dull" stuff he found on the British stage at the time. Aside from David Mamet's American Buffalo (his favorite play), McDonagh cites filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Terence Malick as his chief influences. This has made him something of a renegade in the London theater world. So have incidents like the row he got into at a 1996 awards ceremony, when he had too much to drink and Sean Connery told him to shut up.

But if that helps jar British theater out of what he dubs its "cycle of boredom," so be it. "I want to write plays that shake you up a little bit," he says, "plays that a film fan would be interested in seeing, like the new De Niro movie." He's already got a lot of them waiting eagerly for the new McDonagh play.