The condemned

Martin McDonagh is one of the best things to happen to English-language theater in the last 40 years. His plays are funny and tragic, violent and tender, scorching in their depiction of casual human cruelty and yet cognizant of the human longing for transcendence. Each of his dramas stands alone: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, for example, is about a mentally troubled middle-aged woman and her final chance for a mate; The Cripple of Inishmaan is about a gentle young man and his attempt to escape the simple-minded cruelty of his island home; and The Pillowman is about a totalitarian state in which a writer's worst nightmares are carried out in reality by a mysterious criminal. Every one of these plays contains riveting dialogue, fascinating character studies and unpredictable action. And each acquaints us with a worldview in which life is as silly as Flying Circus, as tragic as Agamemnon and as hopeless as a Billie Holiday song. Even if you disagree with McDonagh's philosophy, you can't honestly find him anything but brilliant. These plays are formidable.

Now Sarasotans have an opportunity to see yet another McDonagh work, this one a lacerating satire about terrorism as the product of ignorance, sadism and emotional retardation. The Lieutenant of Inishmore, currently playing as a part of Florida Studio Theatre's Stage III series, centers around Padraic, a member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) who's so volatile he's been rejected by the IRA and whose only love is for his black cat, Wee Thomas. When the play begins, Wee Thomas has just been found dead on a country road; Davy, the young man who found it, along with Padraic's father, Donny (who was supposed to be looking after it), are terrified to think what vicious Padraic will do when he learns of the animal's demise. But Donny and Davy aren't the only people with Padraic on their minds. There's also Christy, a one-eyed terrorist who wants Padraic dead for torturing an ally and forming a splinter group, and Mairead, Davy's sister, who's in love with Padraic and wants him to accept her as a soldier in the INLA. As Davy desperately tries to cover an orange cat with black shoe polish -- maybe Padraic can be tricked into thinking Wee Thomas lives -- and Christy assembles a couple of gunmen to help him ambush Padraic, the stage is set for an ultra-violent climax that also manages to be a critique of violence as the recourse of callous morons. Even a scene where the bodies of the dead are dismembered comes across as a protest against the romance of "freedom-fighting."

As fans of other McDonagh plays will expect, this one is stunningly paradoxical, very funny and very bleak at precisely the same moment.

No one escapes McDonagh's coruscating irony: Davy and Donny are fools, Padraic is a monster with nothing resembling human feelings (except, of course, for his cat), and Mairead is best known around Inishmore for having shot out the eyes of 10 cows as a statement "against the meat trade." As for the political future of Northern Ireland, it hardly ever comes up except as an occasional aside designed to excuse simple bloodlust. If complicated national issues are mostly ignored in favor of unreflective gunplay, family feeling in Lieutenant is non-existent: Mairead is ready to shoot her brother for the least offense, and Padraic is instantly willing to brutalize his father for not having kept Wee Thomas out of trouble.

Is it possible that comedy can coexist with all this violence?

It can when McDonagh's the writer. Lieutenant is often as ridiculous as a Python sketch, again and again showing us situations -- like the attempt to color an orange cat black or the excuse, when Padraic arrives, that Wee Thomas "has a disease makes him go orangey" -- that are as comic as you'll find anywhere. But the uncompromising nature of Lieutenant, its refusal to idealize any of its characters, reminds one even more of John Millington Synge, who wrote in much the same spirit about the same area of Ireland (Inishmore is one of the Aran Islands) in The Playboy of the Western World. Still, Playboy was mild in comparison to Lieutenant: Synge's Christy Mahon only claimed to have killed his father. Mad Padraic has several more notches on his pistol.

Making it all somehow credible is a strong cast led by Eric Miller as Padraic. Miller's Padraic is one of those lunatics whose very calmness is a clue to his insanity, who tortures and kills as if he were installing a light bulb or planting a garden. His sang-froid just makes him more attractive to Mairead, who's played by Amy Tribbey as a shallow would-be killer with a bit more testosterone than most women traditionally possess. McDonagh says that Mairead's supposed to be 16, but Tribbey looks 10 years older; still, she plays the part splendidly and reminds us that it's not just the men but the whole world that's gone mad in Inishmore. As Padraic's father, Donny, David Vining is superb: absurd and dense and fully aware that his son is too loony to be trusted even by close family. And David Ojala as Joey, one of Christy's murderous gang, turns in fine work as a new recruit who doesn't understand what cats have to do with political struggle. Only Patrick Jones as Christy isn't entirely convincing -- he doesn't appear to belong to the same world as do the others -- but in general this is as persuasively Irish a cast as you'll find west of Galway.

Victoria Holloway's direction is as unstinting in its bloodiness as it is in its comedy, and Nayna Ramey's set of the interior of Donny's cottage is persuasively the home of impoverished Aran Islanders. Marcella Beckwith's costumes are so right, one hardly notices them -- until Mairead puts on a dress, which looks appropriately inappropriate.

The real star of the play, though, isn't Miller or Holloway or any designer -- it's Martin McDonagh, an English-born Irishman whose talent shines in every play, from the small canvas of Beauty Queen to the world-class Pillowman, from the tenderness of Cripple to the mayhem of Lieutenant. If any playwright today has a chance of surviving the inevitable ebb and flow of taste, this has got to be the one.

Take a tour through his mindscape.

And be prepared to find one of the most scathing condemnations of political violence ever written for the stage.