A Feckin' Irish Comedy

It's not the American West, but it's just as wild!

Set in windswept Connemara in the West of Ireland, celebrated Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's masterful black comedy features two hilarious bickering brothers whose rivalry knows no bounds!

SPONSORS
Maxim Real Estate, Inc., Sterling Real Estate, Bloomington Bagel Company

About the Show

“It seems like God has no jurisdiction in this town. No jurisdiction at all.”

From the wind-swept west of Ireland comes Martin McDonagh’s The Lonesome West, a pitch-black comedy of the breakdown of brotherly relations and/in one “quaint’ little village…

After the funeral of their father, Coleman and Valene Connor’s tempestuous sibling rivalry rapidly deteriorates into a verbal sparring match over everything and nothing.

The intense hostility grows to a fever point with only the local priest Father Welsh trying to act as a mediator between the two. Yet he finds himself incapable of fixing the battered relationship, and depressed by the high mortality rate of his parish, the young man drowns himself.

The two brothers try, for the priest’s sake, to mend their ways but their highly strung tempers cannot be defused, and they give up their attempts at reconciliation.

Irish comedy at its most macabre, be prepared to whoop with delight and gasp with horror and leave the kids at home!

About the Playwright: Martin McDonagh

This London born Irish playwright whose Leenane trilogy took British theatre by storm in the late 90’s has never shied away from the themes that interest him the most. Irish Republicanism, Catholicism, familial tensions streak through his writing, dividing public reaction with every new piece. The Lonesome West, the last in the Leenane series, shows definitive echoes of Sam Shepherd’s sibling rivalry from his 1980 play True West.

Reviews

The Portland Tribune 26.May.2006
“…the too-familiar story of people who are permanently linked and yet cursed by their inability to forgive past slights, leaving them to fight on forever.”