Is He Mellower? Ask the Guy Missing a Hand

C M Y K Sxxx,2010-03-07,AR,006,Bs-4C,E1 6 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2010 THEATER Is He Mellower? Ask the Guy Missing a Hand By JASON ZINOMAN OUR years ago Martin McDonagh, the celebrated playwright whose flamboyantly gruesome dark com- F edies have brought smashed skulls, child murder and other carefully calibrat- ed outrages to Broadway, shocked the theater world in an entirely new way. At the height of his creative powers and popularity, he decided to quit the stage while he was on top. Explaining that he was repeating himself and needed to do some growing up, he told The New Yorker, “I’ve said enough as a young dramatist.” He was 35. His early retirement didn’t last long. Af- The playwright Martin ter writing screenplays and directing his first feature, the cult hit “In Bruges,” Mr. McDonagh, above McDonagh, who turns 40 this month, has right, has unretired returned with “A Behanding in Spokane,” a with “A Behanding in work he wrote last year that shows no Spokane,” featuring, signs of mellowing adulthood. below right, Zoe Running at the Gerald Schoenfeld Thea- Kazan, Christopher ter, the politically incorrect thriller follows CHESTER HIGGINS JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES a racist psychotic played by Christopher Walken and Anthony Walken who threatens to kill two small- Mackie. this gambit is a series of familiar McDo- it would be amazing, especially for a play- that? Just stop being so lazy. What century time crooks (Zoe Kazan and Anthony nagh elements: airborne body parts, unex- wright. They would always remember is this?” Mackie) unless they returning his missing pectedly sensitive killers and a propulsive, you.” He is also dreaming of America more hand as promised. Reflecting on his show outlandish plot. And once he finished a Mr. McDonagh said that working in film than ever, in his work and life. He has little during a recent interview, Mr. McDonagh draft, he realized that he couldn’t just stick had made him more ruthless in editing (“A positive to say about his home city, Lon- ONLINE: ARCHIVES said with a laugh, “I realize that I am nev- it in a drawer. “I was going to do a Salinger Behanding” is 90 minutes) and increas- don, which he calls “the rudest place.” As er going to grow up.” Past coverage of the and disappear,” he said. “Then I thought, I ingly determined to show, not tell. “There’s for its theater scene, putting it in the con- In 1994, in less than 10 months, Mr. work of Martin want to have some fun.” nothing that you can’t show onstage,” he text of soccer, he compares the British McDonagh banged out his first seven Sitting in the theater district restaurant McDonagh, including said. stage to “Greek second division.” In his plays while sequestered in a house in an Angus McIndoe, Mr. McDonagh appeared reviews and photos: formulation, New York is the World Cup. Irish neighborhood of London. He de- boyishly handsome with a can’t-help-my- “Movies do that, they tell you,” he add- scribed their animating theatrical philoso- nytimes.com/theater self grin that accompanies the most reck- ed, shaking his head. “Why can’t you do Continued on Following Page phy simply: “Guns. Explosions. Blood.” lessly candid sense of humor to be found in For the next dozen years these entertain- a Broadway playwright. After a few drinks ing works, from “The Beauty Queen of he mused merrily about what would hap- Leenane” (which he wrote in eight days) pen if the elderly woman sitting at a near- to his most ambitious drama, “The Pillow- by table pulled out a firearm and started man” (written in two and a half weeks), shooting. If this reporter was killed, he were produced in London and then New York, with the exception of “The Banshees of Inisheer,” a portrait of an aging writer After a break, Martin with declining skills that Mr. McDonagh McDonagh returns to wants to revisit when he’s older. When he started working on “Behand- Broadway and playwriting, ing,” he said, he intended to recreate his original burst of artistic inspiration but guns blazing. found himself quickly paralyzed. After all, he wasn’t some unknown writer anymore. said, he would volunteer to finish the arti- There were expectations to live up to. “So I cle. “He was having fun when his face got decided I’m just going to write something shot off” is how his tribute would go. trashy,” he confessed. “It could be a runt of As for dying, the worst way, he said with a story, which it is, in a good way.” the sureness of a man who had given the Mr. McDonagh began with the image of question serious consideration, is to be tor- a man shooting a gun into a closet, where tured to death. The best? Eaten by a lion. the audience could hear the sound of some- Wouldn’t that actually involve terrible pain one struggling inside: Gun? Check. Explo- and suffering? “Sure, at the time,” he said sion? Check. Blood? Probably. Following matter-of-factly. “Fifty years down the line SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES With Turturro, Italy Knows No Bounds By FRANZ LIDZ MILAN ROM a stony redoubt on a stage in the Piccolo Teatro Strehler, John Turturro smiles faintly and presses F the palms of his hands together be- tween his knees. Mr. Turturro — born in Queens, living in Brooklyn — is playing an unscrupulous innkeeper in “Fiabe italiane” (“Italian Folk Tales”), a powerfully imagined parable he also directs and has freely adapted from fables collected by Ita- lo Calvino, Giambattista Basile and Giu- seppe Pitrè. Mr. Turturro studies a fool (Max Casel- la) who has just arrived at the inn with a magical donkey. The fool asks him to give the beast food and fresh water and cau- tions him not to say “ass dump” in its pres- ence. Though the innkeeper instructs his wife not to utter the phrase, she blurts it out anyway, causing the donkey to bray, raise its tail and shower the ground with jewels. While upbraiding her for repeating the incantation, the innkeeper repeats it himself. Which prompts a second cascade. “O.K., everyone!” says the fool, at which point he invokes the magical words. Pres- to: Another shimmering load. The donkey dung scene derives from Basile’s “Racconto dell’Orco” and “Ari-ari, Ciuco Mio, Butta Danari!,” No. 127 of the 200 yarns in Calvino’s popular folklore an- thology, published in 1956. In the book’s in- troduction, Calvino quotes a Tuscan prov- erb: “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.” Mr. Turturro, a veteran of dozens of Off Broadway plays and scores of Hollywood movies, added elements that would not be out of place in commedia dell’arte, the an- cient Italian improv theater. His production, which last month concluded a sold- GIANNI FIORITO out tour of Turin, Naples and Milan, fea- tured minstrels, two overlapping stories, grace and humility and reflect an Italy Italian authors have never even been liano. “I had studied Italian for three From left, Richard layers of language (English, Italian, West- without borders, an Italy more of a conti- translated into English,” he lamented. “In months,” Mr. Turturro recalled, “and when Easton, Max Casella, ern Lombardian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, nent.” the United States being of Italian descent I got to Sicily, I was completely lost.” John Turturro, Aida Piedmontese, Abruzzese) and characters Like one of Mr. Turturro’s favorite films, is not a broadening experience. It’s nar- A half century ago Mr. Giuliano was the blissfully free of self-consciousness. Vittorio De Sica’s neo-Realist fairy tale rowing, in that you’re rarely exposed to subject of a groundbreaking piece of politi- Turturro and Diego Bathed in a palette of unlikely yet sump- “Miracle in Milan” (1951), the stories wed the depth and diversity of Italian culture. cal filmmaking by Francesco Rosi, the ac- Turturro, in “Fiabe tuous color combinations, ogresses posed fantasy to the everyday. “They’re the American culture is so flattened. I’m not so claimed Neapolitan director. Mr. Rosi was Italiane” (“Italian Folk as lovely maidens, ghouls vanished into naïve tales of peasants trying to make interested in being made into a pancake so taken by Mr. Turturro’s turn as a throt- Tales”), on tour last enchanted sacks, and princes sprang from sense of their lives,” he said. “They at- anymore.” tled playwright in the Coen brothers’ “Bar- month in Turin, giant talking crabs. As often happens in tempt to give hope to those who have He is interested in having his production ton Fink” (1991) that he asked him to play tales of transformation, power is eventu- none.” And despite their age, the fables re- of “Italian Folk Tales” restaged in a New the lead in “La Tregua” (“The Truce”). Naples and Milan. ally tempered with responsibility, and the main remarkably fresh. “Bernie Madoff — York theater, however. “It would be nice to “The film is ironic and grotesque,” Mr. cruel realities of existence cede to purity, greedy, irresponsible, only out for himself present this aspect of Italy that isn’t seen Rosi told him, “and I feel you have both.” virtue and rectitude. — is an echo of some of the tricksters and very often in the states,” he said. Six years in the making, “La Tregua” was “Calvino said that folk tales are a gen- deceivers,” he said. The play is just the latest expedition in based on Primo Levi’s account of his post- eral representation of life,” Mr.

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