If Martin McDonagh were a first-time playwright, this 2010 play could have been chalked up to an impression of life in the United States too heavily steeped in Sam Shepard and Quentin Tarantino, but since McDonagh’s dossier boasts a worldwide reputation for dark comedies set in Ireland’s western counties—a canon noticeably unenlarged in recent years—the only explanation for this latest effort is that of a reluctant writer pressured to work when he really doesn’t feel like it.
Our action opens in a shabby railroad inn, where bloody handprints on the room’s closet door are our first warning that the occupant, a likewise travel-weary drifter with one hand missing and a.45 automatic in the other, is no ordinary transient. We gradually learn the circumstances behind his injury 20 years earlier, and his subsequent quest to find his forlorn appendage, even to offering a reward for its return. Two hucksters claiming to have the goods have arranged a meet, but the hand they are selling turns out to be a fraud. This deception causes everyone’s plans to spin out of control, with the assistance of handcuffs, homemade incendiary bombs, a suitcase full of severed hands, a twitchy desk clerk eager for a thrill—oh, and our vagabond’s mom phoning in to check on him.
It’s understandable that a citizen of a foreign country, relying on tabloid journalism and action-cinema exports, might imagine rural America to be a wild-west bushveld of psychopathic predators. Historical evidence doesn’t entirely rule out Deliverance-styled troglodytes lurking in Washington state, but McDonagh’s isolation-crazed misanthropes owe more to sensationalistic reports of armed survivalists in the Great Northwest, as does his comic-book depiction of white-trash lowlifes (rendering suspect his likewise grotesque past portraits of his fellow Hibernians, at which we have been invited to chortle derisively).
Profiles Theatre is well acclimated to the blood-and-spit school of drama, but we see none of the depth or commitment that comes with immersion into marginalized personalities. Characters are assigned labels upon their introduction (“cowardly black man, cries when scared” “bossy blonde girl, screams a lot”), and for the next 90 minutes, they reaffirm these traits with physical humor and vocal excess, ultimately generating a benumbed boredom. Darrell W. Cox musters some of his trademark mystery for awhile, but neither he, nor his fellow actors, nor director Rick Snyder, nor author McDonagh himself, appear to be enjoying themselves. They’re not the only ones.