“The greatest enemy of beauty is prettiness.”

-Meyerhold For my brother Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ...... 2

WHY I AM A DIRECTOR...... 2 NEGATIVE SPACE ...... 4 DESPICABILITY ...... 6

DRAMATURGICAL CONTEXT ...... 8

INTRODUCTION ...... 8 THE DISCOVERY OF MARTIN MCDONAGH ...... 8 MCDONAGH’S BIOGRAPHY ...... 11 MAJOR PRODUCTION HISTORY ...... 13 HISTORY OF THE REGION OF CONNEMARA ...... 14 LEENANE, CO. GALWAY, IRELAND ...... 18 THE LEENANE OF MARTIN MCDONAGH ...... 19

FOUNDATIONS OF THE PRODUCTION ...... 35

PRODUCTION DIARY ...... 41

DESIGN ...... 41 REHEARSALS ...... 47

EVALUATION OF PRODUCTION ...... 89

APPENDICES ...... 94

(A) BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 95 (B) EXCERPTS FROM COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN MYSELF AND MR. MCDONAGH ...... 96 (C) EXCERPTS FROM MY JOURNAL FROM MY TRIP TO IRELAND...... 108 (D) PHOTOS OF THE SHOW...... 112 (E) COSTUME SKETCHES & LIGHTING CHEAT SHEET...... 118 (F) MY THEORIES ...... 119 (G) BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY...... 120 Introduction

My thesis production at the Yale School of Drama was

an odyssey inwards. My yearlong grapple with The Lonesome

West by Martin McDonagh grew to contain everything I had

ever discovered about theatre and came to require

everything I knew about myself as an artist.

Before moving into my analysis of the production

itself, I feel it is important to frame the discussion with

three key points: the first is why I am a director,

significant here because this will probably prove to be the

last production I will ever direct stemming from this

reason; the second are two artistic ideas with which I have

been obsessed over the last few years—Negative Space in

Performance and Dwelling in Despicability—for which this production provided a proving ground.

Why I am a director

Peter Parker had his spider and I had my father's grave. In 1980, when I was six years old, I stood at the yawning hole my father would be lowered into and understood infinity for the first time. The forces of significance and mortality came into my understanding at that moment, way too early in life, and all the pain of the universe shoved its way through my six-year-old soul. My uncle grabbed me

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 2 and turned me from the burial, realizing that I was reeling from the visual of that mouth in the ground. But I told him to turn me back, because I needed to look, and what I saw when he did has influenced every decision I have ever made since, most profoundly, my decision to be a director.

Everyone, including the folk singer trying to play, was staring at me in silence. And I felt searing, white-hot shame.

My memory of the year following that moment is gone, erased somehow. But since coming-to a year later, I have had the uncanny ability to hear what people aren't saying.

I have a torturous clairvoyance for subtext, and an overly keen intuition for secret parts of relationships I'm not involved in. That moment of white-hot shame was like the bite of a radioactive spider, which left me with a strange skill I will spend the rest of my life grappling with and trying to understand.

When I began directing in high school, I finally found a place I could communicate and engage with people on the level of subtext and private intentions. I could stop pretending to be ignorant of what I am not supposed to know. I could listen to the rhythms and the breath and the consonants and be open about what I divined. In short, I could dwell in the dimension in which I belong.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 3 Negative Space

Since coming to Yale, I have undergone a massive

transformation as an artist. Most of the development in my

thinking has followed one epiphany I had towards the end of

my first year: the audience does not go to theatre to

admire an actor having an emotion; the audience goes to

have the emotion. The same can be applied to playwriting

and directing: the audience does not want to admire a

playwright having an idea, or a director exploring a

concept, the audience wants to have the idea, and to form their own concepts. The pursuit then becomes both Taoist and Platonic; get out of the way of the thing itself.

This is not to say that a production cannot be highly stylized and conceptualized, quite the contrary, the most formalist of productions can soar, so long as there is an engagement with the audience through “windows” intentionally left open around powerfully realized, resonant imagery. In discussing this concept with Avery

Brooks, when I served as his dresser for the Yale Rep’s production of King Lear immediately following my thesis, he told me that Miles Davis always said, “Jazz is about the notes left unplayed”.

This realization has put me on a somewhat quixotic quest to define Negative Space in Performance. It lives in

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 4 deadpan; it lives in the effort on the part of a dramatic character not to cry; it lives visually in physical manifestations of negative space; it lives aurally in the deliberate setting up and breaking of conventions in chord progressions and melodies. In short, it is the virtuosic denial of visceral release for the audience, leading to compounded excruciation, and ultimate euphoria, when the audience members grant themselves permission autonomously in sync with the event, or in glorious counterpoint to it.

My real search for this definition may in fact have begun years ago, in 1997, four years before I would come to the Drama School, when, sitting in the audience of a performance of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano directed by my friend Dave Dowling, I blurted “I can’t take it!” amidst unceasing tidal waves of laughter at the gigantic pause in the center of the play. I had seen the opening performance, at which the scripted pause lasted a good thirty seconds before the actors continued the dialogue. On this closing night performance, however, the pause lasted five full minutes. And the audience ate it up. Waves and waves of laughter took hold of the crowd as the actors absolutely refused to move forward, and the audience gleefully tumbled through a giant window of negative space in front of them. It was heaven.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 5 Despicability

During this production, I felt a certain vigilance towards what Liz Diamond describes as the need, particularly on the part of younger actors, to appear attractive on stage. This Facsimilation of Attractiveness is created from an aggregate of that which is palatable, admirable and good-feeling in the estimation of the actor—like playing dress-up with only the heroic features of a character’s personality. This leads to murky conflict

(as conflict is ugly), playing at “states of being” instead of action, and theatre at the mercy of the humility (or lack thereof) of the artists involved. Therefore, if actors are encouraged to dwell in that which is despicable, they will develop a keen thirst for conflict, and compel audiences with an exquisite command of what the French call joli-laid, or “beautiful ugly”.

I was deeply blessed on this production with a company that shared my convictions about performance. These four actors were so game to shed that which was beautiful that I sensed a certain relief in discarding the Strassbergian shackles of American acting.

I began experimenting with ways to subvert this in directing Marcus Gardley’s playwright thesis, earlier this year. During run-throughs, towards the end of the process,

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 6 I noticed that this desire on the part of the actors was having a direct effect on the comic rhythm and tempo. I decided to do a “hate-through”, introducing it with a confession of my love for the work of Alec Tok, who graduated the year before me. The actors who had worked with him nodded vigorously, saying that he often intoned,

“fuck the audience” when a need for their approval was interfering with his work. It has since been a constant phrase of mine in rehearsal.

As a collaborator, I struggle with being too nice. I tend to encounter the best in people, which can be very useful, but leaves me wanting to encounter the ugliness.

Doing a “hate-through”, which I prefaced by saying, “make me hate your character”, seemed to alert to the actors that they had been playing the opposite action on the audience and not realized it, because free from it, they went straight for conflict, and fought tooth and nail for what they wanted.

This has since proved a very useful tool in my rehearsals, and I have strived to find other ways to exploit this concept of dwelling in despicability.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 7 Dramaturgical context

Introduction

Researching The Lonesome West, a play less than ten years old, does not yield a great deal of conventional data. For this production, I have endeavored to discover the story of Martin McDonagh’s discovery, and investigate the approach taken by the original director, Garry Hynes. I have looked into the history of Connemara, the section of

Ireland in which the play takes place. I have relied upon my own trip to the town of Leenane, in November of last year, for impressions of the town today. Most informative in my dramaturgical research, is the fact that The Lonesome

West is the third play in a loosely connected trilogy which, when taken together, provides a wealth of knowledge about the Leenane of Martin McDonagh’s imagination.

The discovery of Martin McDonagh

Garry Hynes graduated from the University College

Galway in 1975 with a degree in history, having taken up directing as a freshman in the dramatic society of the school. Sitting in a Galway cafe with her friend, actress

Marie Mullen, she decided, at 22, to start Ireland’s first fully professional theatre company outside of Dublin, and

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 8 chose the name “Druid” from an Asterix of Gaul comic strip printed in the newspaper lying in front of her.

In her first season, she produced eight plays, beginning with a production of Synge’s The Playboy of the

Western World, which has remained in their repertory since, and which is, as I write this, being revived at the Druid as part of a massive exploration of the Synge canon. In

1979, the company acquired a converted tea warehouse in

Galway and established their first performance space. In

1983, Playboy transferred to London’s Donmar Warehouse, then run by Nica Burns. On Garry Hynes direction of the piece, Burns told Benedict Nightingale of the New York

Times, she “has the ability to hear the music of a play and orchestrate it so that the rhythm builds and you’re swept along in a rush of emotion, it’s as if she’s conducting a concerto.”

A similar rhythmic virtuosity was required of Hynes 13 years later, on a cycle pf plays compared quite frequently to Playboy, Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy: The Beauty

Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome

West (the title of which may even be lifted from Synge’s text).

In 1994, Hynes had been the Artistic Director of the

Abbey theatre for three years, on its best day a job widely

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 9 regarded as the most thankless job in Irish theatre.

Frustrated by internecine struggles with the board, she

returned to her old role at the Druid and asked to see

scripts that had recently arrived in the mail. She was

struck immediately by A Skull in Connemara (the middle play of the trilogy, whose title is a quote from Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot), and asked to see what else the as yet unproduced author had submitted. She read The Beauty

Queen of Leenane, and knew she’d found a solid writer. She assumed he was 40 or 50 years old, given the confidence of his tongue and his nuanced vision of the hardscrabble country life in Connemara. The man she met, however, was a

24-year-old from south London, who’d spent summers and school vacations near Galway his whole life.

“Suddenly it made sense,” she told Nightengale,

“Martin is perched on the cusp of two cultures, and that’s what makes him extraordinarily interesting. He’s brought his social and cultural inheritance to his work, and he’s looked at it from the outside and spun it round his contemporary experience. He’s Irish, but he’s also a south

London lad, tough and impatient with the past. He feels no need to kneel at his heritage’s shrine.”

Hynes daringly chose, in 1996, to christen the new municipal theatre in Galway with the world premiere of

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 10 Beauty Queen, starring long time friend and fellow Druid

Theatre founder Marie Mullen as Mag Folan. The play was a

raving success. She would ultimately stage the entire

trilogy, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West, in Galway, London and Sydney,

Australia. She would take Beauty Queen and The Lonesome

West to Broadway, and be the first woman to win the Tony for best director (for Beauty Queen), and in the process, make Martin McDonagh one of the most exciting playwrights of the 1990’s.

McDonagh’s biography

Martin McDonagh grew up as an Irish Catholic among a small group of tightly connected Irish families living in

England, while “not overtly as a Republican,” he stipulated to Alan Franks of the London Times, when discussing his criticism of the Troubles in the North, “all those rebel songs would come out when we were with Irish friends.”

On June 15, 2002, he told Liz Hoggard of the London

Independent that, growing up, he was “painfully shy and effectively had no friends. I never had a girlfriend. I used to fantasize about writing plays so that I could get a woman.”

McDonagh left his Catholic boys school at 16, and started writing. His brother John did the same and to this

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 11 day is also a writer, of screenplays, though neither brother reads or discusses what the other was working on.

There is a great deal of apocryphal information surrounding McDonagh’s rise to fame, which he seems to gleefully perpetuate.

He’d only seen eight plays when he wrote The Beauty

Queen of Leenane, most notably American Buffalo with Al

Pacino when he was fifteen years old.

By the age of 27, McDonagh had four major productions running simultaneously in the West End of London, the first playwright since Shakespeare to do so.

He describes his influences as Sam Peckinpah movies, punk and post-punk music, like The Clash and The Pogues.

The Pogues, in particular, represented for him an understanding of what it is like to be an Irish kid growing up in London.

On June 22, 2002, he told Alan Franks of the London

Times that the Pogues “were the musicians who, more than anyone else, were doing what I was trying to do as a writer, trashing the old forms while at the same time respecting them, and basically being against the dullness of the old. In that pocket of Irish families, there were some who wanted the kids to learn Gaelic dancing, but I wasn't interested in all that. I was trying to be a

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 12 Londoner. The Pogues had that London sensibility as well, and those great lyrics. For a lot of London [Irish] kids that band was about the first thing that cemented a pride in both the ancestry and in London.”

Major Production History

When I emailed McDonagh to tell him I had chosen to do

The Lonesome West for my thesis, he responded that he

“always liked that one better than Beauty Queen anyway.”

Comparisons between the two plays crippled The Lonesome

West’s run on Broadway, given their structural similarities and the lack of any substantial time between its opening and the closing of Beauty Queen.

The Lonesome West, directed by Garry Hynes, premiered as part of a tour of repertory performances of the entire

Leenane Trilogy on June 21, 1997 at the 400-seat Town Hall

Theatre in Galway. The following month, it opened at the

Royal Court in London, and continued to tour through

Ireland, culminating in an October stint at the Dublin

Theatre Festival, plus three weeks in Sydney, Australia in

January of 1998.

The show received its own production back in Galway at the Druid Lane Theatre on July 14, 1998, and toured Ireland the following November.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 13 A co-production of The Druid Theatre and the Royal

Court opened in the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway on April 27,

1999 and played for just 55 performances, although it received four Tony nominations, for Best Play, Best

Featured Actor (Dawn Bradfield), Best Leading Actor (Brían

F. O’Byrne), and Best Director (Garry Hynes).

The Druid revived the show in July of 2001, three years to the day after its stand-alone debut in 1998, as part of the Galway Arts Festival, and will most likely continue to keep it as an active part of the company’s repertoire.

History of the region of Connemara

In ancient times, the warrior tribe of Conmac was sent into what is now known as Connemara by the ancient Gaelic

Kings of Connacht. Christian Mystics and hermits followed in the 6th century. Viking raids pounded the area in the 9th and 10th centuries. The Normans gained Connemara in the 13th century, but shortly lost it to the O’Flaherty clan, who held onto the land until the Cromwellians sacked Galway in

1652.

Oliver Cromwell1 ordered that no residents of Connemara could live within three miles of the sea, to insure none would conspire with naval invasions. Many Catholics who had

1 Oliver Cromwell currently burns in hell.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 14 had their land confiscated in other parts of Ireland were sent to Connemara to continue their struggles to survive under Cromwell’s reign of terror.

After the Interregnum, the land in Connemara was divided among landlords, who leased their lands to peasant farmers. As I drove through the countryside last November, what struck me deeply was the amount of stone walls running in jagged lines and demarking tiny patches of green. It seems like the entire country had been covered in rocks and over centuries they were painstakingly piled into low walls to contain the buried beauty and passion of what was hidden underneath. The English policy during the time between the

Restoration of the Monarchy and the Great Hunger was, upon the death of a farmer, to automatic subdivide all of his land among his sons, ensuring that each generation would be poorer than the last--with the stipulation that if one son should choose to convert to Protestantism, he would be awarded all the land automatically. Thus would the English promote brotherly hostility and self-oppression among the colonized, and make resentment a national past time. The more I saw these stone walls carving the grass, the more I came to think of Valene and Coleman in The Lonesome West not as representing Protestants and Catholics, as I had originally surmised, but simply as being both Catholic,

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 15 self-oppressing vestiges of this oppressive practice. They

are brothers; there is no oppressor. There is only each

other.

The potato blight of 1845-48 hit Connemara

particularly hard. The land was hard and could grow little

else. Many people emigrated or starved to death. The Poor

Law Extension Act of 1847 decentralized the government

relief of the poverty stricken, and placed it primarily in

the hands of the landlords. Those landlords who attempted

to take their charge seriously were almost immediately

bankrupt. The region recovered slowly over the next three

decades and slowly began to enjoy tourism. Beginning at

that point and continuing to this day, many families,

including the Connors of The Lonesome West, turned their homes into guest houses for extra cash (in the middle of scene 7, Coleman says, “...D'you remember when we had them backward children staying for B&B, and they threw half your

Spiderman comics in on the fire?”).

The 1870’s also brought a Gaelic revival among intellectuals of the region, who pushed to exhume the Irish language from near extinction due to the proliferation of

English in school and in the workplace. This aspiration was bolstered by the establishment of the Irish Free State in

1922. The project of the revival of the Gaelic tongue was

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 16 particularly successful in the remote northwest. Many of the signs I encountered in Connemara were in Irish, most without an English translation. There is also an all-Irish radio station, listened to by Mag and Maureen in Beauty

Queen.

Ireland is unique in Europe in that, due to the

Hunger2, it was untouched by the industrial revolution. The economy remained agriculturally based (and poverty stricken) until the very late 20th century during the

Information Age, when Ireland’s economy began to be referred to as the “Celtic Tiger”. The Lonesome West takes place in 1993, just as the economy was beginning to take off. On June 22, 2002, Martin McDonagh told Liz Hoggard of the London Independent, “whatever you think about the whole

Celtic Tiger thing, my natural instinct would be to see the underside of all that - the people who fall through the cracks.”

True, perhaps, to McDonagh’s take on the area, and contradictory to a popular belief to which I, myself, subscribed, most of the people I encountered in Connemara were not abundantly friendly. The ground is hard and brown and the weather is constantly overcast. Given the brutal

2 Many Irish people refer to the Famine of 1845-48 as the “Hunger” because to call it a famine is to imply a drastic shortage of food. In fact, there were ample foodstuffs in Ireland during the years of the potato blight, but almost all of it was exported by England to the British army overseas.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 17 history of the area it is a wonder that there are any residents, so it follows naturally that those that remain there exude and certain pride at their survival and a ferocity in the ways they survive.

Leenane, Co. Galway, Ireland

During my trip to Ireland in November of 2003, I visited the town of Leenane, where McDonagh’s trilogy takes place. It is situated at a crossroads and is nestled deep into Connemara in the northwest of Ireland. I was struck, in my drive to Leenane, an hour northwest of Galway, by the starkness of the landscape. The Maumturk Mountains jut dramatically out of broad flat plains of brown grass and bogs. At any given point on the road, you can see for miles in every direction, inside a vast enclosure set by the distant hills. Despite the magnitude of these vistas, however, there is an average of only one house per such valley. The visceral impact of it is indeed profoundly lonesome, except for the robust population of gravity- defying sheep that bespeckle the steep hills to their peaks and complicating any sense of the rustic with the fluorescent colored spray paint sprayed directly onto their wool to identify them to their owners.

Despite being at a crossroads, Leenane does not have a great sense of municipality. The center of town, where two

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 18 regional highways intersect, is nestled among very high mountains, and consists of four or five storefronts, a convent, a gift shop and a lake. The houses of the residents are hidden from the main thoroughfares on narrow, winding dirt roads.

Upon my arrival, I stared for a long time at the quiet lake that, in the play, claims the life of Father Welsh and

Tom Hanlon. From what I could gather, it seems like it’s shallow for a long stretch, and someone committing suicide would have to maintain their resolve to die for a long time before being swallowed by the water. A man from the Leenane

Cultural Center who told me there had been a performance of

The Beauty Queen of Leenane in the town hall which he found unimpressive. He pointed behind the storefronts to some stone walls on a steep hill in the distance and told me they were “pre-famine potato ridges”, and that most of the potato farming was on hills. This made me wonder of this is the reason my left leg is an inch shorter than my right.

The Leenane of Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh weaves into the Leenane trilogy not only the interlocking lives of four families, two loners, and the priest who stands as the ailing moral center, but a breathtaking worldview of vengeful retribution, moral

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 19 bankruptcy and viral gossip. I have broken up my analysis

into subsections of Issues in Genre and Structure, Culture

of the Town, and Ideas in the Text.

Issues of Genre and Structure

McDonagh once described the project of his writing as,

“the trashing of old forms while respecting them.” In genre, the universe he has created engages in a dialectic between Naturalism, the Theatrical and the Comic. In

Strindberg’s Miss Julie, there is a bombardment of the senses of the audience, beginning with the vivid olfactory data of an actual liver, actually cooking on the stove when the play begins. McDonagh jettisons decorum and takes bold strokes at our senses, particularly that of smell. Urine plays a large role in the imagery of all three plays, first in Beauty Queen with Mag’s unfortunate relationship to the kitchen sink, then in Skull in the discussion between

Mairtin and Mick about Tom Hanlon’s failed attempt to launch an investigation into the original owner of a bucket of urine in which a man had drowned, and in Lonesome West, the conversation in scene 7 takes a dark turn when Valene confesses to having urinated into a pint of lager and given it to Coleman to drink. Smell is important in each of the plays, beginning with, again, the smell of the urine in the sink, as well as Maureen’s detection of the smell of burnt

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 20 paper following Mag’s destruction of the written message.

In Skull in Connemara, Tom Hanlon, the town’s policeman and

one half of its moral center (the other being Father

Welsh), alternates smoking a cigarette and sucking on an

asthma inhaler, straddling destruction and salvation with

alternating breaths. A major plot point turns when Father

Welsh, in scene 3 of The Lonesome West, detects the smell of burning plastic in the air, and leads Valene to discover the melting of his saintly figurines.

One gets a sense of the theatrical in the end of scene one of Beauty Queen with the simple stage direction, “Mag stares grumpily out into space”. When I saw the Broadway production, Marie Mullen, who is a force of nature, looked straight out at us with an air of what are you looking at? to the delighted vocal response of the audience. The end of the first act ends similarly, with Mag staring blankly “out into space”. Encoded into the rhythms of each text is a subtle acknowledgement of the audience, which renders the opacity of the fourth wall suspect. The challenge then, in staging each of these plays, is in reconciling their opposing forces of a Naturalistic-and therefore necessarily convincing—environment with a Theatrical—and therefore deliberately fake—conveyance, without falling into the trap of polluting stage moments with ambiguous swipes at both.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 21 The performers must deftly jump back and forth between the extremes, spending as little time in the muddy middle as possible.

The strategy he employs to reconcile this dichotomy, is in his use of the comic—particularly, in the deployment of contrast and colorful metaphor. In discussing Valene as a cheapskate, Coleman concludes, “he’d steal the shite out of a burning pig.” In the same scene, the audience is forced to grapple with the idea of a man poking vicious fun at a priest, who is in supposed spiritual authority, and with the fact that, despite just returning from his father’s funeral, he feels fine, if a bit annoyed by the older funeral attendees asking about the food at the reception.

The resulting genre from these seeming contradictions is a Naturalistic, subliminally Theatricalist dark comedy, a complicated directorial algorhythm on its own, which can be exacerbated by dominant trends in Strassberg-influenced

American actor training, which subordinate the text to the attempted authentication of the actors’ simulated emotions.

I was lucky in that I was blessed with four natural

Brechtians.

In structure, plot and a sense of the protagonist grow less foregrounded throughout the three pieces. One gets the

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 22 feeling of looking at the inhabitants of Leenane through a

microscope, and exponentially increasing the magnification

with each play. Beauty Queen is a fascinating yarn, with

multiple plot turns, rising action and a massive crisis. A

Skull in Connemara has a slower metabolism, and goes more

deeply into the characters, not so deep however, as to

discover the dark secrets buried within, i.e. if Mick Dowd

killed his wife. The Lonesome West has no clear protagonist and contains multiple purgings of dark secrets, seemingly in an attempt to find the bottom of the well of murk that is the soul of a Leenane inhabitant. It is therefore naturally a little less popular than the other two, but a cult favorite among those McDonagh fans with discriminating taste, and, as I mentioned above, the playwright himself.

The seemingly apocryphal biographical data in orbit around McDonagh’s rise to fame includes the fact that he saw only eight plays before he read Beauty Queen, and that he wrote it in eight days after reading a book on how to write plays. Contradicting this are dozens of subtle theatrical references, including Shakespearean quotes and, as mentioned earlier, the title of A Skull in Connemara being lifted directly from Waiting for Godot. Another instance of theatrical hyjinx is detectable in a pattern

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 23 that stretches across all three plays. In each, a letter3 is deployed as the ultimate Aristotelian reversal.

In Beauty Queen, Mag burns the letter from Pato Dooley before Maureen can read it, yet the letter manages to change the world inalterably anyway, despite its own destruction (Marcus Gardley has begun to employ similar pranks, as in his play …and jesus moonwalked on the mississippi, in which the letter arrives that will change the world, and no one can read it). In Skull, Mick writes out a murder confession and subsequently burns it, to foil policeman Tom Hanlon’s ambitions. In The Lonesome West, the letter is a suicide note from Father Welsh, in which he outlines a peace process for the brothers on which he stakes his soul. At the tragic failure of the process, and at the end of the play, the letter is once again set alight, like its cousins. This time, however, Valene snuffs the letter out and places it back on the wall with the crucifix, muttering, “I’m too kind hearted is my fecking trouble.” The impact of such a moment can only be truly felt when taken at the end of a trilogy in which the burning of letters has been an act of vindictive

3 Elinor Fuchs taught, in Theory class of my first year, about the arrival of a letter into conventionally constructed plays (in the case of many modern and classic plays) or a phone call (e.g. in Master Harold… and the boys), or a messenger (in Oedipus), as always being the sign of an “Aristotilean reversal”, which changes the entire world of the play, and sets it on a new course.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 24 retribution. The salvation of the last letter, and the granting of another chance for it to change the world into which it arrived, offers some hope from the playwright, in the last minute we spend in Leenane, that all is not lost.

The Culture of the town

In Religion: While everyone is Catholic in Leenane, there is very little evidence of profound faith.

Catholicism provides little more than a common vocabulary and fodder for philosophical musings. “That’s the thing about being Catholic,” says Coleman towards the end of The

Lonesome West, “you can shoot your father in the head and it doesn’t even matter at all.”

Father Welsh is the Priest of Saint Patrick’s Church in Leenane, and serves as the moral and spiritual center of the town, but suffers from the knowledge that his parish has been forgotten by God. No one in the town, at least none of the other characters we meet, is ever sure if his name is Walsh or Welsh. In the etymology of Irish names,

Welsh means “foreigner” or “stranger” or “failure to fulfill an obligation”; Walsh, which is the first guess at his name wagered by most residents of the town, means nothing at all.

Most of the townspeople conspire to keep incriminating gossip about the others, particularly that which has to do

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 25 with murder, away from him, and the murderers themselves will only confess about impure thoughts and betting on horses.

He is profoundly affected by the suicide of Tom

Hanlon, perhaps out of a certain kinship because Hanlon is the police officer of the town, and is rendered impotent in his investigations of crimes by his superiors. Father

Welsh, who is beset by nearly constant and public crises of faith, probably empathizes deeply with Hanlon’s failed struggle.

In the Economy: Across the three plays, the places in the world outside of Ireland that are mentioned and traveled to most are Boston, Massachusetts (the nexus of the Irish-American Diaspora, and where I come from), and

England (the historical oppressor, much maligned in Beauty

Queen). Most of the young people in the town, including

Coleman and Valene when they were younger, seem to have to spend time in England making as much money as they can in horrid working conditions. Boston is the location of all

American relatives, all of whom seem to be doing better than the lot left in Leenane.

On the employment opportunities of Leenane, Pato

Dooley says, in Beauty Queen:

“I do ask meself, if there was good work in Leenane, would I stay in Leenane? I mean, there

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 26 never will be good work, but hypothetically, I’m saying. Or even bad work. Any work… I know it isn’t here I want to be…I can’t put my finger on why. (Pause.)

Of course it’s beautiful here, a fool can see, The mountains and the green, and people speak. But when everybody knows everybody else’s business… I don’t know. (Pause.) You can’t kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge twenty year.”

Pato’s estimation of the grudge-mentality of the local town folk smacks of an environment of self-oppression of the poverty stricken.

Somewhat poignantly, Pato and Maureen, each of whom have worked in England, held the same jobs that McDonagh’s parents did when they went to England. McDonagh mentions that the story relayed by Maureen—of not understanding the insults of her English employers and needing a Trinidadian woman working alongside her to explain them—is taken directly from his mother’s experience.

In Gossip: After being kicked in the shin in the first scene of The Lonesome West, Father Welsh bellows, “What kind of town is this at all? Brothers fighting and lasses peddling booze and two fecking murderers on the loose?” One senses that he is the only sane citizen of the town of

Leenane, but almost immediately Girleen adds, “and me pregnant on top of it… I’m not really,” and we find ourselves enjoying the torment of the only moral compass we have found in the town of Leenane. Father Welsh’s

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 27 powerlessness reveals not only how barren the moral

landscape of his parish is, but also how brazenly his

parishioners discuss their fellow sins.

Gossip is viral in Leenane. In Skull, Mairtin mutters,

“most around here… will smile at you ‘til you’re a mile away before they start talking behind your back.” All twelve characters in the trilogy know secrets about the others, and there is a prevalence of the suffix –and the world knows behind the most pointed of insults. In Beauty

Queen, Pato and Maureen lament Coleman’s de-earring of

Valene’s dog, Lassie, months before the news befalls Valene himself (at the end of scene 7 of The Lonesome West). Pato later sends a letter to Girleen telling her to stop falling in love with priests.

Most hauntingly, the characters not only have no regard for almighty justice, or even local justice (Tom

Hanlon, amidst a breakdown over his inability to enforce law, commits suicide), even the power of gossip has no hold over them. The onlooker is left to wonder where the moral compass is pointing, or if there even is one at all.

In the Generations: There are three distinct generations in the trilogy. The oldest includes Mag Folan and MaryJohnny Rafferty. They are slightly more religious than the rest of the residents of the town, but only

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 28 slightly. They have a toughness and manipulativeness that illustrates their extra mileage in a town filled with calumny. MaryJohnny is, somewhat sadly, the only non-family member to attend Mag Folan’s funeral.

The middle-aged generation includes Maureen Folan,

Pato Dooley, Mick Dowd, Tom Hanlon, and Coleman and Valene

Connor. They are a sad lot, dealing with failure in love, in vocation and in relationships. These stories are theirs, and they are all tragic. They are on the cusp between a total clotting of their souls and their final chance at redemption. Each of them ends up alone, steeped in loneliness, and staring down the barrel of infinity. They are reminiscent of Vanya lamenting the fact that, if he lives to sixty, he’ll live 13 more agonizing years.

The youngest generation is fascinating. Three characters, evenly disbursed throughout the three plays, introduce an element of danger surpassing that of the blasé morality of their elders. They are tough, irascible, and bored. They have turned amorality into its own code of ethics, based on a fascination with pain. Mairtin Hanlon once cooked a hamster but laments not having used an oven with a window in the door. He describes the day in which he smashes skulls on a kitchen table with a wooden mallet, and follows it with a bit of drunk driving, as a very good day.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 29 And he is hard to kill. He is hit in the head with said mallet, twice, and remains upbeat and chipper. When told that life isn’t fair, he responds, through a face dripping with blood, “It is fair. I like it anyways.”

Ray Dooley is deeply bored by Ireland. He pounds the table with his fists and chants, “I don’t want to be here.”

He narrowly dodges an attempted poker swipe from Maureen

Folan by finding a tennis ball long stolen from him and brandishing it at her, oblivious to the imminent threat on his life.

Girleen, as I discovered in rehearsal with Amanda

Cobb, is extremely masculine. The contrast between her demeanor and name is heightened by her chosen profession of selling Irish poteen (moonshine) door to door to middle aged men, and murderers. It is complicated by her clumsy love of Father Welsh, chosen perhaps because she could never have him. Like the others, there is an attempt on

Girleen’s life, but her would be killer, is the town itself. Following the water-suicides of Tom Hanlon and

Father Welsh, Girleen is dragged screaming from the lake where she repeatedly goes, sits, and stares. Unlike the resolution with the burning letter, we are left to wonder if she will also kill herself, or if she will prove as buoyant as her fellow young ones.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 30 Ideas at work in the text

Morality: In the beginning of The Lonesome West,

Father Welsh observes, “God has no jurisdiction in this town. No jurisdiction at all.” Later, just before killing himself, he continues with his observation, “…I'd have to have killed half me fecking relatives to fit into this town. Jeez. I thought Leenane was a nice place when first I turned up here, but no. Turns out it's the murder capital of fecking Europe.”

It is impossible to discuss Martin McDonagh’s portrait of Leenane without discussing morality. Tom Hanlon and

Father Welsh try to apply and distribute justice according to existing codes, i.e. the law and Catholicism, but cannot. They are confounded at every turn by inhabitants who have no use for such codes, and brazenly ignore them.

Hauntingly, there is a charm to the way in which these very dangerous people interact. However, this deliciousness in observing their whimsical cruelty comes at a cost to the stability of our own morality. Good productions of these plays must endeavor to destabilize the morality of the audience, in a similar way to what the impact of original productions of Ibsen must have been.

Escape: There is an undeniable relationship between fire, water, and the need of these characters to either

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 31 escape from Leenane, or keep each other there. In her efforts to thwart any instinct on Maureen’s part to leave town and put her in a home, Mag Folan burns any message she intercepts for Maureen that she perceives as dangerous. In retribution, Maureen scalds Mag’s hands in oil heated on the same stove.

In frustration over the eternal fighting among the

Connor brothers, and his own feeling of being trapped within his own failure, Father Welsh scalds his hands in melted plastic saints. Each character devises a way to raise hell, in order to punish or entrap each other, and deliver themselves to their own version of Heaven.

In The Lonesome West, Tom Hanlon and Father Welsh employ the lake as their only escape from Leenane, and from life. Though in method a watery baptism, both men consign themselves to perish in Hell by taking their own lives.

Community: One day in rehearsal, we were working on the scene between Father Welsh and Girleen, sitting by the lake, and had not yet discussed the other two plays in great detail. We arrived at the following patch:

WELSH: … This is where he walked in from, d'you know? Poor Tom. Look at as cold and bleak as it is. Do you think it took courage or stupidity for him to walk in, Girleen?

GIRLEEN: Courage.

WELSH: The same as that.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 32 GIRLEEN: And Guinness. WELSH: (Laughing) The same as that. (Pause.) Look at as sad and as quiet and still. GIRLEEN: It's more than Thomas has killed himself here down the years, d'you know, Father? Three other fellas walked in here, me mam was telling me.

WELSH: Is that right now?

GIRLEEN: Years and years ago this is. Maybe even famine times. WELSH: Drowned themselves? GIRLEEN: This is where they all come. WELSH: We should be scared of their ghosts so but we're not scared. Why's that?

GIRLEEN: You're not scared because you're pissed to the gills. I'm not scared because... I don't know why. One, because you're here, and two, because... I don't know. I don't be scared of cemeteries at night either. The opposite of that, I do like cemeteries at night.

WELSH: Why, now? Because you're a morbid oul tough?

GIRLEEN: (Embarrassed throughout.) Not at all. I'm not a tough. It's because… even if you're sad or something, or lonely or something, you're still better off than them lost in the ground or in the lake, because ... at least you've got the chance of being happy, and even if it's a real little chance, it's more than them dead ones have. And it's not that you're saying 'Hah, I'm better than ye', no, because in the long run it might end up that you have a worse life than ever they had and you'd've been better off as dead as them, there and then. But at least when you're still here there's the possibility of happiness, and it's like them dead ones know that, and they're happy for you to have it. They say 'Good luck to ya.' (Quietly.) Is the way I see it anyways.

I felt like I needed to activate the final monologue for Amanda. I asked the people in the room, stage managers, dramaturges, to stand on chairs and stare at her as she spoke. Instantly the monologue came to life as she sourced off of our stares. When she was done, I asked her to source

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 33 directly off of the audience, when we went into performance, and pretend their heads were the ghosts she was seeing (to take advantage of what I was beginning to perceive as the decaying opacity of the fourth wall). James

Reynolds then pointed out that, according to Skull, most of

Leenane’s dead had been dumped into the water anyway. In that moment, layer after layer opened up for us in the text as we realized that an Irish audience, familiar with the trilogy, would feel a deep sense of communion with their ancestors in that moment, as well as with the actors on stage. We dreamed at what must have been a profoundly beautiful moment for Irish audiences, and sorely wished we could come close to it, as Americans performing for

Americans.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 34 Foundations of the Production

My original intention when trying to find the right

script for my thesis was to find something with a large

demand for spectacle, in order to force me into the realm

of the visual. I considered plays like Camino Real and

Titus Andronicus, but could not shake the feeling that I

was taking an artistic vitamin—something I needed but would

not enjoy. In early conversations with Liz Diamond and Ben

Sammler, The Lonesome West came up as something I would

like to do at some point in my life. “I know,” I said in

the Director’s Room, banging the table with my fist, “I

will direct this play someday, but it’s not the right size

for my thesis.”

It generally takes me four or five sittings to get

through a play because I can’t resist penetrating its

problems as I read. No sooner do I read a line of dialogue,

or a particularly compelling stage direction, but the ink

on the page begins to liquefy and swim away, and I am lost

in a darkened theatre. The Lonesome West stands out as one of the few scripts I have burned through. I did so, twice, feeling certain that it was a sign that it was the wrong show for my thesis. I needed a tough nut to crack.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 35 One night I picked up The Lieutenant of Inishmore,

McDonagh’s ballet of carnage about a terrorist in a splinter group of the IRA. I zipped through it without standing up and sat there, shaking, when it was done. It was after midnight on a Tuesday and I found I had to go for a walk. I brought Brendan Behan’s The Hostage to

Kavanaugh’s, ordered a whiskey and dutifully cracked it open to continue the search, but found I could not get past the first page. I would stop at nothing to direct The

Lieutenant of Inishmore, despite its never having been done in North America. I quickly found his agent and fired off a letter to McDonagh (in appendix B). Three weeks later, checking my email one morning I found one from Martin

McDonagh himself in my inbox (also in Appendix B).

This began a very exciting few weeks of popping into

Vicki Nolan’s office to here the progress on what would, if it worked out, be the coup of my career. Stephen Sultan, president of Dramatists Play Service, wanted my head.

McDonagh’s agents were growing antsy. My sense was that he was frustrated about the lack of a Broadway production after years of waiting and wanted to give this to me as a lesson to the sluggish Broadway producers, sitting on the option. Ultimately, however, his American agents killed it, citing New Haven’s proximity to New York; he wrote me a

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 36 very gracious and apologetic email (appendix B), and I was back to Square one.

When I was twenty years old, I worked for an organization called City Year, which is an urban peace corps now in 10 or 12 cities across the country. I took a year off of college and volunteered for the Boston chapter, where I engaged in leadership development through full time community service. At this point, in 1994, they were beginning to expand to cities around the country, and I volunteered for a second tour, to help the organization expand to Columbus, Ohio.

Growing up in Irish Catholic Boston, a city that has been 50% Irish since the turn of the century, I took for granted my heritage, and barely thought about my history.

When I moved to Columbus, I realized how unique Boston’s predominantly Irish demographic truly is in our country. In

Columbus, I would be introduced to people as Irish, as if it were some sort of novelty. People would often make sure

I knew about the Irish War Veterans club outside of town.

Quite often, I was pointed out to other Irish people in the room.

This was a rude but fascinating awakening to a certain inimitability I had no idea I had. It was problematized by

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 37 my realization of how segregated Boston is compared to

Columbus, and perhaps most of the midwest.

During my year in Columbus, I read The City Below by

James Carroll, a novel about two Boston Irish Catholic brothers, one who takes the low road and becomes a mobster, one the high road and becomes a priest. James Carroll was my father’s best friend when they were together in the seminary. He remains to this day my ostensible Godfather.

When I finished book, I was left with three overwhelming sensations. A love of Boston, a devotion to my family, and a new found Irish pride that would burn brightly for the next nine years. To be so effected by a work of art, to hear it like a clarion bell, made me realize that I would need to explore all of these feelings in a piece of my own art. I returned to Boston, and to directing, and shortly thereafter started a small theatre company that would become my obsession until heading off to Yale.

I resisted The Lonesome West as long as I could, thinking it was too small, or not a classic, or had too few actors. What it did have, I could not deny, was my DNA encoded into it. My relationship to my own brother was very similar, growing up, to that of Coleman and Valene, and our dad was a priest. But more importantly, I GOT it. I got how the Irish, after centuries of being a trading card country,

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 38 oppressed and poverty stricken, walk the line between being ferocious and adorable.

The Lonesome West is about the failure of treaties, and the failure of religion, in culturally embedded conflict. It’s about trapped souls, dry-rotted through poverty, clinging to each other through the only mutated and malnourished emotions they have left.

Martin McDonagh depicts a ferocious landscape of moral famine, where religion--in the form of Father Welsh--and

Peace Treaties--in the form of his suicide letter--have failed to broker a moment’s peace among brothers. Valene and Coleman could represent many things: the troubles in

Belfast, English to Irish oppression, Protestant and

Catholic antagonism, and Catholic self-oppression. At times, they even bear a striking resemblance to Israel and

Palestine.

This play asserts that the basest and most elemental human instinct may in fact be cruelty. But, that cruelty may be a form of love. It may be a very cynical view of the world, but this play asks a hugely important fundamental question, documents and religion have failed to create peace, and human beings will resort ultimately to remorseless violence and their basest animal instinct to kill, so therefore… now what?

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 39 I chose this play because I have felt, since September

11, a shift in the way Americans must participate in the world. The them-ness and the there-ness I used to feel about Israel/Palestine and the troubles in Northern Ireland are swiftly becoming far less remote. One of the most important questions Americans will face over the next ten years, as the chickens come home to roost, is how could we not have seen this coming?

There’s not much of a difference between “democracy” we are spreading and the stranglehold of our marketplace, and now the entire rest of the world hates us. The moral perch on which our government stands its foreign policy is in fact a gallows. The moral bankruptcy we witness in the

Lonesome West, exacerbated by poverty and driven by perpetual despair, is our own future in America, unless we can come to terms with the uglier side of ourselves.

In my production, I will try to communicate that to be human is to be cruel. And to be cruel is to be human. Life is cruelty interrupted by short catastrophes of love. If we pretend our capacity for cruelty does not exist, it will destroy us. If we apply blind morals to a “them” over

“there” we don’t understand, we become who we are fighting.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 40 Production Diary

Design

In the design we have endeavored to create a naturalistic world, filled with detail and a history of conflict. The cabin is cramped and rustic and the lake, where everyone goes to die, perhaps the only escape from this amoral landscape, is an infinite void. And this expansion and contraction is reminiscent of the explosive relationship of the two brothers.

From the beginning of the design collaboration, we all knew we would move towards a straightforward representation of the space and the clothes, and that the real art would be addressing the Yale Rep as a container for the event. My initial readings of the play lead me to believe that the molten underbelly of the piece would be obstructed by any directorial abstraction in the design.

It was suggested, here and there, that I consider the

New Theatre at 1156 Chapel Street, given the intimacy of the venue, but stemming from my experience seeing

McDonagh’s Beauty Queen on Broadway in 1997, I knew his words could fill a big house. The University Theatre presented the opportunity to simulate a similar Broadway experience, but this did not appeal to me either, because I

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 41 felt the UT to be too old fashioned. The darkness and the

cavernousness of the Rep, combined with the strangeness of

its shape proved the most appealing set of challenges in

terms of choosing the right venue for the production.

Sets: Sara Clement’s design of the cottage did not

stray far, in shape, from the original design of the play,

nor the intentions of the playwright. The major part of our

collaboration lay in the details in the set décor, the

scene at the lake (and the transition to and from it) and

most dominantly in the masking.

Sara and I had numerous conversations at the beginning

of the design process about the tension between the modern

and the rustic that lay in the visual world of the set.

What were the identifying tokens that would set this 1993

Irish cottage interior apart from one found in Synge’s

Playboy of the Western World, for instance? In our first

design meeting, we read through the whole play as a team,

and realized that despite the modern references in the

text, this is a play that could happen any time, and we had

to be careful about not being specific enough. Sara set

about to create the feeling of layers of history, including when exactly the “woman’s touch” of the brothers’ mom had disappeared from this house. One disagreement we had was in the color of the walls. She created white walls, based on

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 42 her research of Irish cottages and her sense of the ugly- beauty we were going for. I felt strongly that the walls should be warm in this environment. Through much discussion, we arrived, in our conversation over the model, at an impasse, and tabled the discussion until tech.

The work on the cottage itself took about a week; we then spent two weeks working on the masking, and the lake scene. Masking in the Rep presents a huge challenge. The lack of a proscenium creates an energy-leak hazard above and beside the actors. The pipe walls on either side of the stage serve as a constant reminder that you are in a theatre, preventing a truly illusionistic approach to any play staged there. Producing anything other than Greek drama in that space requires a serious investment of thought into what every gesture means, including no gesture. We tried to think of it as if we had had this theatre built especially for the show. This helped us realize that any masking attempting to hide the pipe walls would seem to be combating the event itself.

The problem then became solving the issue of the visible offstage actor. Because the box set sat on the stage with negative space on either side, the actors would be seen crossing to the “front door” of the cottage, and from Valene’s bedroom to the Upstage Left theatre entrance.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 43 We had to make the actors disappear upon leaving the stage itself, but, as we had previously determined, we could not mask the pipe walls. Ultimately, Sara alighted upon the brilliant idea of short, ostensibly invisible masking flats covering just the doors to backstage. The actors leaving the stage would be masked by the door they had just opened, and would be forced to walk directly upstage and make a sharp turn, thus concealing them from the center section of the audience.

We then turned our attention to the space above the actors. We had decided to stage the scene at the lake in front of long black flats, cut on the top to represent distant hills, which would be lowered behind the bench on the jetty. We took pains to set the bottom of these flats, which were visible above the cottage, at the exact height that would be optimum for aiming, at the perfect angle towards the audience, the energy from the stage. We were so meticulous with this height, that during budgeting, when given the opportunity to save $1,000 by adding a foot to the front flat, we could not accept.

In tech, I ate my words about the white walls. The opportunities they provided Gina in lighting were far more versatile than warmer, more amber walls would have.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 44 The set, in performance, conveyed an important idea

that had been present for Sara and I from the first design

meeting. We felt that the cottage should feel compact, with

little escape, while the lake should feel extremely

expansive. Coming back from the father Welsh’s monologue in

scene 5, we used automation to lift the flats out of the

way of the set which, also automated, closed it’s side with

actors already in place for scene 6, given the feeling of

the walls literally closing in on the brothers and their

conflict.

Lighting: As with set design, issues of meaning, vis-

à-vis the visible pipe walls and “voids” on either side of

the set, came into the conversation with Gina Scherr very

early. She was resistant to the idea of allowing the

negative space on either side of the set remain, in our

minds, a “void”, insisting that if she lit an actor outside

the door at any point, or even through the door, the void

would automatically be something. Despite agreeing with her, we were all stumped as to how to move forward. She ultimately came up with a brilliant visual solution, which was to cut a beam of moonlight across the door, and thereby describe the surroundings of the house, and light the actor through the door, but still allow the darkness surrounding the set to retain its relative anonymity.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 45 Lighting the transitions was a major challenge. The script made huge demands on scene shifts, requiring a crew to come out and make major adjustments. Lighting them begged the question of who they were, but due to the intricate nature of the changes, not lighting them was not an option. Gina and I settled together on lighting the figurines and, upon its arrival, the stove, as a way to give stage time to these inanimate objects that, it could be argued, are additional characters in the story. The crew then used bounce light to accomplish their tasks.

Costumes: Chloe Chapin’s costumes were exhaustively researched. We were both interested in allowing the actors into the collaboration, feeling it inappropriate to show the actors drawings of their characters at the Meet and

Greet. We had a rack of clothes that lived in the rehearsal room, and allowed the actors to mix and match their clothes every single day of rehearsal. This was an invaluable innovation that contributed immensely to visceral characterization. Rarely, if ever, was James Reynolds dressed as anything but a priest, for instance. This method was extremely luxurious and I would recommend it to anyone.

Chloe was a fixture in rehearsals, and even began contributing thoughts about scenes, and tidbits of dramaturgy.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 46 We also made subtle to major alterations in each of

the actors appearances, from altering the color of James

and Jacob’s hair, to full wigs for Amanda and David.

Sound: The first thing I said to Keith Townsend

Obadike was that I did not want to use Irish music. I have

worked with Keith multiple times, and have found him to be

borderline clairvoyant in his ability to exact the right

choices for mood in a piece, but choices that are totally

outside the realm of what is obvious. Keith was the first

to drift in his thoughts to the American west. We would all

follow him in time, on various, if subtle, levels. For him,

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was the natural influence

to gravitate towards in thinking about Connemara.

Half way through my process with Keith, I recanted my

initial insistence that there be no Irish music, and he

began filtering Irish melodies through the vocabularies he

had already begun to establish. The result with a perfect

and odd sound that had resonance for both the culture we

were trying to depict, and that of artist and audience.

Rehearsals

What follows is a thorough account of my rehearsal

strategies from the Meet and Greet on December 15 to the first run through on January 20. A key piece of wisdom I picked up during my time here is not to rush to the first

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 47 run-through. Before coming to Yale, I used to split my rehearsal processes roughly in half, building a runnable version of the show as fast as I could, then taking it apart again. One day, in a Directing Practicum class in the middle of my second year, Liz and David stayed after with me to discuss the metabolism of my rehearsal process and impressed upon me the value in slowing down. I have, since that conversation, directed five or six plays, and in all of them I delayed the first run-through until three or fours days before technical rehearsals were to begin.

The results were immediately noticeable in the ease of the performers, the atmosphere of rehearsal, and in my confidence in the rehearsal room, most particularly with not having answers—just a hungry mind for questions. I experienced a deeper penetration into the plays, and came to discover that the most important work is done before the first run-through, as opposed to my previous assumption.

Therefore, the innovations and explorations worth noting here all happened previous to the first run-through, after which I switched, as I usually must, to organizer, employing the aggregate wisdom and taste I have developed about theatre to date in order to help the production achieve the right standard.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 48 Monday, December 15, 2003 The Meet and Greet

The Meet and Greet was, as I had insisted and hoped,

an extravaganza. Emily, my school show administrator, honored all of my requests—for Guinness to be served and

Irish Step Dancers to perform. There was a time for mingling in which I acted like an electron on fire, followed by five numbers from the Irish Step Dancing company. After that the smallish crowd settled in for our presentation and I began my address, which was deeply personal and included a slideshow and journal entry- readings from my trip to Ireland.

My speech lasted about 30 minutes and is encapsulated in the section of this document entitled Foundations of the

Production. The designers followed, as did the school show administrator. I asked everyone to open with a self- composed Limerick. The actors, as a means of introduction, each delivered one as well.

Tuesday, December 16, 2003 One-on-Ones at the Anchor Bar

On Tuesday I met with each of the actors in the Anchor for an hour. I asked them questions about where they grew up and what brought them to the drama school. I asked them for examples of when they had shut down in a rehearsal and when they had soared. I talked with them about their

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 49 characters, including a look at given circumstances and musings thereon, as well as their characters’ conflict with themselves, the others, and the world. I asked them about their tricks as actors and what they were sick of getting away with. And finally, where they were at in the conservatory process.

Wednesday, December 17, 2003 The Readthrough on the Yale Rep stage

In the readthrough, I read an email I received from

Martin and handed out Taytos as gifts. They read it from the stage of the Rep and the designers listened from the house. I moved all around the house listening for acoustical weak spots. The readthrough, like all readthroughs, was disheartening slightly because of the jarring I experienced based on the difference between tembre of their voices and what I had heard in my mind’s ear, this was a natural part of the process for me. I also noted that if they privileged the melody of the dialects, it killed the stakes. It occurred to me as I listened that sarcasm has no place in this play. And neither does self- indulgence. It cannot be attractive or adorable. I was tempted to tell them, for our purposes, that this is not a comedy.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 50 After the readthrough was finished, I requested that

every one among the cast, design team, and tech folks read

A Skull in Connemara and The Beauty Queen of Leenane over break so that we would have to full breadth of knowledge about the world we were creating.

Afterwards, I met with the designers to get their impressions of what they’d heard. I also requested that we refer to the project as “Our thesis” so that no one ever felt alienated when I would say my thesis. Though my delivery was tongue-in-cheek, my message was one of a commitment to collaboration. And part of my diabolical plan to keep them laughing while brainwashing them into giving me exactly what I want.

Thursday, December 18, 2004

We had no rehearsal today due to scheduling constraints.

Friday, December 19, 2003 Discussion, Irish Documentaries & Movies in the Annex

We met in the annex and had beers and watched Irish movies. Before we did, however, I gathered everyone around the table and began by asking them to share the meanest thing they have ever done and the angriest they have ever been. As with all such conversations, it was slow going at first but then yielded up great images and memories and

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 51 started to generate raw material for our process, which I indicated to them after we were done.

I then spoke much more intimately about why I am directing this play and what it means for me to do so:

I began by telling them the story of why I direct, and my father’s grave, which appears in the introduction this document. At the end of it I continued…

"But all of that is changing. In my critique for this semester, Liz Diamond pointed out to me that I had been extremely quiet for the past few months because, she suspected, my reasons for doing theatre were being called into question. And she is right. I am very good at making collaborators love working with me, but I am not as good at pushing them past their fear. In that way, I encounter the best in people, but my work lacks a compelling ugliness that Alec Tok's work carried in spades.

"When a group of pilots were trying to break the sound barrier, they encountered huge danger. They would get up to the edge of the barrier and their planes would start shaking and they'd freeze. Many of the planes came apart or exploded. A lot of pilots died.

"Finally, one pilot got up to the threshold, and instead of freezing when it all got scary, he hit the gas. The universe knows when you are up to this, this pushing through the threshold of the unknown, and it will surround you with glory, as it did him.

[I then showed them a picture of a plane breaking the sound barrier.]

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 52 Figure 1-An F18 breaking the sound barrier

"In order for this play to be earned, and not cute or pointless, you must each break your own sound barrier. And I must be there with you.

“I want to tell you what I love about actors, and why they terrify me. But first I want to describe a scenario that happens in combat. A platoon walks into an abandoned bunker and starts searching it. All of a sudden, as they stand in a circle around a closed room, a live grenade is tossed into the center of them and they all stare at it, frozen. Like us, 5 out of 6 men will think, “oh my god, I’m going to die.” But 1 out of the 6 will think, “either we will all die, or only I will die if I dive on that grenade. No one else will do this, so I’m about to die no matter what.” And then that man jumps on the grenade, killing himself and saving the lives of the five men standing around him.

“Here is what I love about actors, and why they terrify me: the poets of the world have written torturous paths through phenomenal texts throughout history. They’ve written bottomless misery and loneliness into the souls of Hedda

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 53 Gabler and Hamlet. These characters deal with horrible ugliness in their interactions with other human beings. They are betrayed and abandoned. They are killed. And you brave souls will throw yourselves on these characters nightly. You are more emotionally courageous than the rest of us. You perform interactive feats of such magnitude, people pay to watch you do it. The actor throws herself on the ugliness, like the soldier throws himself on the grenade, to save the world from its ugliness, while we safely watch. I love you for that.

"However, David Chambers pointed out an interesting phenomenon among directors doing work that is this personal to them, which he called 'pornography'. That of, 'you go through this, and I'll watch and be here when you get back'. I used to think of actors as doing emotional reconnaissance, and would imply to them 'I'll be here when you get back'.

“But that won't work here. Here I will be beside you every step.

"What I learned in the readthrough is that you are all good at comedy and understand rhythm, which for us means we don't need to focus on comic timing, and can apply it to our work in the home stretch. From this point forward, until further notice, this is not a comedy. We have to go to the dark places. We have to exist in the molten world that flows underneath this play. I hope I can maintain the courage to do so, and I hope you come with me.”

We then watched When Ireland Starved, a documentary about the hunger that was deeply compelling and sad and pulled into focus the resilience of the people we are depicting. When I finally stopped, James uttered "thank god" because the sadness of what they went through was so gripping. We then watched The Commitments for about half the movie, then The Field by Jim Sheridan, which was filmed

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 54 in Leenane itself. We closed out the night with the fight scene from The Quiet Man.

During one break, Dave Bardeen said he keeps thinking he can't possibly get more excited about the project, and then every minute he's in rehearsal, he does.

Saturday, December 20, 2003 Table Work on the Yale Rep stage

The next day, Lung Kuei was kind enough to let us use the Rep stage for table work to get a sense of the acoustics. We opened with The “This is a What” Game4 which was great because it took them a bit to get it, and I dropped clues here and there about its relevance to what we were doing without being too heavy handed.

We also tried some Group Juggling5 to provide a contrapuntal exercise to This is a What.

4 This is a What is played with everyone standing in a circle and passing, in a clockwise motion, monosyllabic singular objects, such as “a key”, “a phone”, “a watch”. As the objects are passed from hand to hand, a required dialogue is exchanged: “This is a key” “A what?” “A key.” “A what?” “A key.” “Oh! A key!” The object of the game is to deploy as many objects as there are people, so that as you are answering the person ahead of you (“A key”), you must figure out how to simultaneously ask the person behind you (“A what?”). As a new group of people attempts the game, there is always a cacophonous breakdown, with a bottleneck of objects in one person’s hand, half way through the circle. The key to success in the game, is simultenaity and rhythm. The game can only work if you listen to the rhythm of the group and fit your delivery into it. So that everyone says “A what?” at the same time, and identifies the object at the same time. The game promotes the need to subordinate one’s personal content work in the delivery of one’s dialogue to the rhythm of the piece as a whole. 5 Group Juggling involves standing in a circle and developing a repeated pattern of throwing balls to each person. The group is told to receive from, and throw to, the same person every time, and that no one should receive a ball twice

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 55 Walton came in to hang out, as he often does at seemingly the most delicate moments, which manages to rattle my concentration every time, despite my affection for the guy.

We opened the discussion talking about the inherent

American-ness of our production. I continued to share thoughts I had gathered in Ireland about how indeed

American I am, and how American our audience will be.

When Dave and James read the first scene, I had them keep trying it, without accents in jump styles: Western,

Children's Theatre, Horror Movie and Love Story6, in an effort to prime the canvas and remove some of their subconscious preconceptions, and needs to be ‘correct’.

We eventually moved down to the Rep Green Room because it was so cold. Bardeen talked about the act of maintaining someone else's image of you so that it can be true, or, before it is returned to the first person throwing. The object is to get as many balls (or more) as there are people in the circle travelling through the air. While everyone’s task is simple, the result is spectacular—indeed, rarely do balls collide midair—and illustrates the majestic results of a symphony of simple actions. It also illustrates, as balls are inevitably dropped, that if you grow even momentarily preoccupied with a mistake made on one simple action, the entire symphony breaks down. When balls are dropped, they are to be ignored instantly for the sake of the “symphony”. 6 Doing a scene in multiple “Jump Styles” is an important arrow in my rehearsal quiver. I find that if the actor is encouraged to do the scene “strong and wrong” they will be far more free with their choices and less preoccupied with achieving ‘correctness’ or, worse, being ‘good’. While most of the raw material assembled can immediately be disposed of, quite often there are hidden gems to be tripped over. The game is extremely fun, which is effective in building esprit de corps, and encourages tuning in early to the innovations of their scene partner. The instructions for each genre are simple: for Western, heighten the inherent danger found in other people, while for the Love Story, heighten the safety and harbor that the other presents. For horror movie, heighten the “nightmare” or worst case scenario connected to the actions of the other characters and for children’s theatre, heighten the positive.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 56 needing a witness to actualize yourself. In other words, being who you think you are in the eyes of someone else so that you can convince yourself you are who you think you are.

We focused on sound, image, and rhythm throughout the day, and discovered a lot of hard consonants in the scenes with the brothers, mostly bilabial fricatives and plosives, and then lots of soft consonance in the Father Welsh

Girleen scene. I tend to direct with my ears, and therefore use table work not to belabor notions about meaning in the text, or chew the proverbial fat, but as a gymnasium for the mouths of the actors. I usually close my eyes as they read, which allowed me to detect, in a speech Girleen has in scene 4, a pattern in which all the words that begin with "L" are like a genetic encoding of the play itself

(page 37, capitalization added for illustration).

GIRLEEN: (Embarrassed throughout.) Not at all. I'm not a tough. It's because ... even if you're sad or something, or LONELY or something, you're still better off than them LOST in the ground or in the LAKE, because ... at LEAST you've got the chance of being happy, and even if it's a real LITTLE chance, it's more than them dead ones have. And it's not that you're saying 'Hah, I'm better than ye', no, because in the LONG run it might end up that you have a worse LIFE than ever they had and you'd've been better off as dead as them, there and then. But at LEAST when you're still here there's the possibility of happiness, and it's LIKE them dead ones know that, and they're happy for you to have it. They say 'Good LUCK to ya.' (Quietly.) Is the way I see it anyways.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 57 We also noticed an end to the playfulness whenever

Girleen would walk into the room, and that violence often occurred shortly thereafter.

We got as far as Father Welsh's speech, which James and I decided would be best played if as if he were saying it to them from beyond the grave, as opposed to a vocalization of the act of writing the letter in the moment of writing it.

The timbre of each of their voices is not at all what

I pictured, and I struggle now with the question of whether or not to try to go into the breach with each of them on that.

Our big task, it occurred to me, would be to create an atmosphere of brutality and magnitude, offset by lyrical politeness, and whimsical verbal cruelty.

Monday, January 5, 2004 Completion of Tablework

We began with a completion of table work. I played the

Adverb Game7 with them and discovered that it was a useful tool to explain my feelings on Negative Space in performance. The further the dissonance between the vividness of the adverb chosen and the mundanity of the

7 The Adverb Game is one in which a volunteer leaves the room and while they are gone, the rest of the group selects an adverb, such as “sexily”, “creepily”, “lackadaisically”. When the volunteer returns, they select participants at random and ask them to perform mundane tasks (e.g. do jumping jacks, call the dentist) in the manner of the adverb. After three such requests, they have three chances to guess the adverb.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 58 action prescribed, e.g. "take a shower 'abortively'", the more story we, the audience, would be compelled to write on top of what we were watching.

We read through the play, noting more alliteration and assonance. Over the break, Alice sent us some information both on Cain and Able and the story of the two thieves. We talked about the brothers in relation to each of these stories, trying to identify where there was resonance and where there were complications. We found, as is often the case, that McDonagh’s writing deftly avoided any one-for- one interpretation.

In the reading today, I felt the first distinct difference between American and Irish sensibilities, in that whenever the actors got the instinct to sigh or pause in the middle of a thought or sentence, it sounded jarring with the Irish wordplay. It became clear to me that thoughts sprang fully formed from the mouths of these characters, and my actors were going to have to lean off of putting “discovery” as a rhythm into the lines themselves, setting up a difficult dilemma in staying in the moment—the solution for which we will simply have to invent.

Liz Diamond joined the rehearsal for a little while before going over to Gia's, and provided cheerful commentary.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 59 Tuesday, January 6, 2004 Beginning of Scene work Act 1, Scene 1, pages 1-8

Melissa and I developed a plan to get through six pages a day, or one page an hour. I’m worried about my stamina through six straight hours, but have learned that I can’t blow my wad of ideas in the first hour and must be ready for every hour as it comes. I tend to take very long breaks, for which I have primed Melissa, preferring to let the need to work organically reemerge. I can get a great deal of clandestine directing done standing outside smoking with the actors anyway, which is part of the strategy. I have found, using this strategy, that the breaks get shorter and shorter and the work deeper and deeper.

The first French scene, the one between Father Welsh and Coleman, is a conundrum. We ran it like a Spanish soap opera to start off, with both actors acting like Antonio

Banderas. There seemed to be a sense of pomp and machismo to the world we were introducing to the audience, so this exercise allowed an immediate investigation of that reservoir of interactions.

In the margin of my legal pad, at some point during the first few hours, I scribbled in capital letters and interlocking “O”s, “THIS IS SOOOOO HARD”. I was not prepared for the mercurial nature of the action in this

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 60 play. Ordinarily, I have no problem getting out the scalpel on a scene and working through the beats to define muscular, radioactive action, but something in this scene, perhaps that it must set the terms of the contract with the audience, eluded my investigation. When I first read this play, I resisted doing it for my thesis because I thought it would be a cakewalk. I had no idea it would present the

Mensa problem that now lay before me.

What I knew was that, amidst the steady drip of exposition, in this first French scene, a man in his late thirties was poking vicious fun at a priest for being alcoholic. The priest was there in the man’s house doing

God’s work after returning from Coleman’s father’s funeral.

The comic incongruities were, (1) the teasing (and lower status) of a man of the cloth at the hands of one of his parishioners, and (2) the fact that, despite returning from his father’s funeral, Coleman seems totally fine. My job with the audience was to make this vicious subversiveness appealing to them.

I knew that two important elements bumping up against each other should be Coleman having the pride of a lion, and Father Welsh having irrepressible buoyancy in his eagerness to do God’s work (which serves as a nice smoke screen to his suicidal tendencies).

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 61 I noticed some tension in the language that was useful. McDonagh had created what I call a “klaxon”8 with the very title of the play (capitalization added):

WELSH: (Pause) This house, isn't it going to be awful LONESOME now with yere dad gone?

COLEMAN: No.

WELSH: Ah it'll be a biteen LONESOME I'm sure.

COLEMAN: If you're saying it'll be a biteen LONESOME maybe it will be a biteen LONESOME. I'll believe it if you're forcing it down me throat and sure aren't you the world's authority on LONESOME?

WELSH: Are there no LASSES on the horizon for ye, now ye're free and easy? Oh I'll bet there's hundreds.

This discovery gave Father Welsh some needed backbone in the scene, as he was able to bite deeply into the word

“lasses”.

At the end of the day, we added Jacob at Valene’s entrance and my feeling of bewilderment began to subside. I was left at the end of the day, however, with the feeling that this first French scene would haunt me throughout the production.

8 A klaxon is the sound a submarine makes to know how far is from the ocean floor--it sounds like a high pitched, vibrato “pooom”--and is often heard in establishing shots of the exterior of a submarine in war movies. I discovered linguistic “klaxons” when directing my verse project of William Shakespeare’s Can You Dig It during table work, in the first scene with Orlando and Oliver. In the scene, the brother’s argue about their inheritence and the primogenitor laws that grant everything to Oliver. Throughout the scene, each brother continually uses the word “will” in multiple meanings, and it keeps exploding into other words that begin with W. It is the linguistic equivalent of loading a cannon with the fodder of the klaxon word, and then firing it when you reach the alliterative association. Or of a thermometer rising and bursting.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 62 Wednesday, January 7, 2004 Scene work Act 1, Scenes 1-2

We began with a long discussion about what makes a man become a priest, and what the function of a priest truly is. I provided as much insight as I could, based on my father having been one, and Melissa tossed in a lot of information, as a practicing Catholic, about the role of her priest in her life.

We then brainstormed what a day in the life of each character might be, and captured it all on the whiteboard in a format similar to a daily planner. This was helpful in getting a sense of the monotony of life on the dole shared by the inhabitants of Leenane.

As we talked, I made a note in the margin, “Maybe

Father Welsh is the protagonist”. But the question now bugs me, who is really the protagonist?

We worked through to the end of Scene 1, adding

Girleen into the mix and coming up for the first of what will be many times against the problem of the delivery of the laugh line “I’m not really.” After tossing in “And me pregnant on top of it” to Father Welsh’s diatribe of the town in which he lives. I feel the instinct to make her as deadpan as possible, but get the sense that there will need to be some sort of global breakthrough with Amanda, given

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 63 her natural depth, so that the deadpan comes from somewhere emotionally active.

We spent the last two hours working on the first

French scene in scene 2, between the brothers. To get started we just gave it a whirl, and for the first time in my directing career, I witnessed a golden first attempt.

Jacob Knoll and Dave Bardeen were so gung ho, that they were completely off book and confident with the lines, dropped in to natural instincts of movement, and utterly watchable on their first ever attempt at the scene. I thought, when I came to the Yale School of Drama, that every rehearsal would be like that—where the actors would be so damn good I wouldn’t know what to say. This night was one of those extremely rare (I now realize) moments.

Thursday, January 8, 2004 Scene work Act 1, Scene 2

All night the problem of the identity of the protagonist of this play haunted me. Rather than decide for myself, I thought it might be fruitful in the promotion of story-telling agency on the part of the actors to go through it with them. I got out the whiteboard, amidst

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 64 their gentle teasing, and began to use a method of plot analysis I adapted from the teachings of Robert McKee9.

After going through each of the characters (see figure

2), with the actor taking the lead on each, analysis, we reopened scene 2 after last night’s sparkling first attempt. My notes throughout the work are embarrassing to reread. They are the notions of a frustrated or lazy director: all states of being, hunches, and thoughts based on my tastes of theatre in general. There are no insights into the depths of the action of the scene, or ideas about fueling the actors. The notes are all essentially an argument with the actors to achieve “betterness” and are all based in results, and therefore useless. Why can’t I

9 In the Plot Analysis Method, we took each character and ran them through 7 questions: Premise, Controlling Idea, Inciting incident, Complications, Crisis, Climax and Resolution.

Premise The end to the sentence, what would happen if… Controlling idea The theme or “moral” of the story based on the end. Inciting incident The surprise even that sets the plot in motion (this should preferably happen within the play itself, not before) Plot Complications Examples throughout the story (following it in a linear fashion), stretching from the inciting incident to the crisis, of the protagonist expecting one thing but being surprised by something totally other, which sets up the next expectation, which will be subverted by the next surprise. There are usually 5 or 6 of these per play. Crisis The ultimate choice with which the protagonist is faced. It must be a choice between 2 positives or 2 negatives, because a choice between a positive and negative is not a choice. Climax The actual making of the choice (this moment is usually not more than one line). Resolution The consequences of the choice for the protagonist, and usually the denoument of the play itself.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 65 break it down? Why can’t I get inside of this thing? I spent the day feebly adjusting their rhythms, which is my fallback when I’m lost, and walked out of rehearsal terrified that I’m not up to directing a play I thought I had, on my most fundamental levels as an artist, in the bag.

Figure 2

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 66 Friday, January 9, 2004 Scene work Act 1, scene 3

I have begun to suspect that my methods in the

rehearsal process will have to take two roads following a

distinction the acting teacher Peter Francis James makes

between Comprehension and Apprehension. Comprehension, as

he describes it, is the intellectual understanding of something, e.g. danger. Apprehension is the physical understanding of something, which he demonstrates by suddenly (but lightly) slapping a student on the face.

Their sudden shock and alertness is a perfect example of apprehending danger.

Over my career as a director until now, I believe I have focused primarily on the comprehensive level in my interface with the actor. This has led, perhaps, to a certain lack of ugliness and guts to the performances in my plays, despite a modicum of charm. This play requires total expression and exploration of us on both levels, which will be a huge challenge for me.

With that in mind, and reeling from my abortive thought process in yesterday’s rehearsal, I began the day’s work with an exercise. As we began the work on scene three, which begins with a dialogue between Father Welsh and

Jacob, I asked the actors to choose an animal they might

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 67 get some useful raw material inhabiting, and where that animal would hold its tension. Jacob chose a monkey and

James, a tiger. I blindfolded them and we began a game of

Blindman’s Bluff, wherein James silently stalked, and tried to catch, Jacob, in total silence.

As I watched, it seemed necessary to change the power dynamics, because the scene involved a mutual pursuit of the other, doomed at the hands of what was emerging as the comic contrast in the scene: Valene’s shallowness against

Father Welsh’s depth. I changed Jacob into a snake and

James into a mouse, and we continued our silent pursuit.

When we got into the scene itself, I wanted to continue to investigate the apprehension of their emotional states, having just heaved the dead body of Tom Hanlon from the lake to the Hanlon’s house. I asked Adam, the assistant stage manager, to stand in for the body of Tom Hanlon and had them do the scene while hauling Adam’s limp body into the room and onto the table.

I then asked James to deliver his monologue, his drunken, clumsy pre-eulogy, to Adam’s dead body there on the table, taking special notice of the “L”s through out the speech, and trying to heal himself with those “L”s.

WELSH: (Pause) A lonesome oul lake that is for a fella to go killing himself in. It makes me sad just to think of it. To think of poor Tom sitting alone there, alone with his thoughts,

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 68 the cold lake in front of him, and him weighing up what's best, a life full of the loneliness that took him there but a life full of good points too. Every life has good points, even if it's only ... seeing rivers, or going travelling, or watching football on the telly...

VALENE: (Nodding) Football, aye...

WELSH: Or the hopes of being loved. And Thomas weighing all that up on the one hand, then weighing up a death in cold water on the other, and choosing the water. And first it strikes you as dumb, and a waste, 'You were thirty- eight years old, you had health and friends, there was plenty worse off fecks than you in the world, Tom Hanlon’...

After trying the scene multiple ways, but still resisting breaking it down into smaller sections (why?), I introduced the topic of the Catholic Faith and the difference in each brother’s relationship, both to it, and to clergy. We determined that Faith for Valene is cerebral; while for Coleman it’s visceral.

The arrival of Coleman in scene three, following shortly after Valene discovers the melted saints, creates an exercise in comic contrast. In order for the scene to work, I needed to compose stark juxtapositions across the stage. Contrasting Valene’s mood immediately before, and immediately after discovering Coleman had melted his figurines; contrasting Valene’s homicidal rage with

Coleman’s lackadaisical demeanor; contrasting the aggressively macho intensity of the fight between Coleman and Valene with the passivity and sensitivity of Father

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 69 Welsh, and this contrasted with the drastic measure he ultimately takes. In directing the scene, my task was to keep each actor out at the extremes and allow them to be next to each other, while discouraging a certain slouching towards the center from every side, which was inevitable as an instinct for them. I knew this scene could not be pretty, or in anyway redeemable, and that if we dwelled in the ugliness of it, it would be come unforgivingly compelling.

I used, as a tool to get the actors out to the extremes of feeling, a punching bag I arranged for before rehearsals started (an idea I stole from Liz Diamond).

Before we ran it through Coleman’s entrance. I had each of the fellows hit the punching bag repeatedly with a whiffle bat, to work up masculine aggression in each of them. The results were indeed terrifying. A silence would creep into the room after each one had a session with the bag; a discomfort that was uncomfortable at the display of ugliness that had just occurred. It was absolutely perfect.

This was the buzz I wanted to create with each of the fight scenes, especially this one, so that when the moment came where Valene was indeed about to fire the gun into

Coleman’s head, we could pull the plug on that intensity, creating a complete void in the moment before, to give the

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 70 subliminal impression that indeed a death was about to occur, rendering Coleman’s bullet moment that much more surprising.

After each of them had hit the bag, James offered it to me, and encouraged me to have a go. David Chambers saying the phrase “don’t let it be pornography” flashed through my head, and I grabbed the bat. But when it came to truly beating the stuffing out of the bag, and displaying such naked and ugly aggression myself, I wimped out. I took a couple of hard swings without really betraying any of my composure, and launched us into rehearsal, hiding my inner sense of shame.

Saturday, January 10, 2004 Scene work review Run of Act One, and Scene work: Act 2, scene 6

Today we reviewed all the scene work that had come before and I was able to watch for energy leaks, and nervous ticks. I notice Jacob tends to blink a lot during his lines, probably as a means to siphon off excess energy.

When I informed him of this he seemed genuinely grateful and encouraged more such notes. Dave was throwing a hell of a lot of wind behind his vowels, so that they all ended up sounding like a diphthong between “H” and whatever vowel it was. James seems to vocally tie up his thoughts in a

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 71 melodic bow at the end, which for me belies who Father

Welsh is. Melodically and tonally, his sentences should

spill forth at the end like a river delta. We don’t see

much of Girleen in the first act; I’m excited to bring

Amanda into the fold.

At the end of the rehearsal, I gave the actors an

assignment for Monday, based on and modified from a

character development exercise I heard about Mike Alfreds

doing with the cast of The Black Dahlia earlier in the year. They are to make four lists: (1) A list of all the given circumstances of their characters; (2) A list of everything they say about themselves; (3) A list of everything they say about other people; and (4) A list of the things they say they know, i.e. wisdom they have collected and impart. They are also to bring in a few pieces of music that describe their characters.

We are now at the exact halfway point before tech.

Monday, January 12, 2004 Fight choreography Character Work

Rick Sordelet came and put the fights together and they are incredible. He is so creative and such a brilliant storyteller. He's choreographed the fights for this play four times, but it was totally clear to me that this was different than all the other times and he wasn't quoting

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 72 himself. I told him I wanted the fights to be fast, ugly, and look dangerous. The way he seems to work is through asking of the actors what the characters would do, in their wildest imagination, and using that as raw material. I was in awe of his total confidence in working with exactly what he has in front of him, and without obstructive preoccupation, which is something I strive for in my work.

For the character work, I had each of the actors sit in a chair, one at a time, and read the lists they had prepared to the rest of the company, as they rest of the company milled around and listened. I then asked them where their physical center was, and played the musical selections they brought in, instructing the rest of the company to inhabit the character and go through a day in the life of the character played by the person seated, who simply sat, watched and took notes, which they then keep for themselves without reporting back on them.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004 Scene work: Scene 4

We worked the scene with Father Welsh and Girleen, which marked a significant change in tone from the work done on the first three scenes of the play. I finally feel that I’ve broken into this play, which has kept me on the outside longer than any play I’ve ever directed.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 73 I have found over the course of the past 6 or 7 days

of scene work that I could not find my way into this play.

That, like in Ireland, it was not allowing me to be a

citizen of its country. I have, until today, only been able

to run whole scenes over and over again, having the vaguest

of philosophical quandaries based on all big picture

problems. We did a lot of talking and discovering. We've

taken very long breaks. We've gotten to know each other and

established a great vibe in the room, but I have not been

able to get my hands dirty until today.

We began with an Anatomy of Flirting exercise I developed in Directing Practicum last year as part of an interpretation of Don Juan and Three Sisters10. This brought

a nice sexual tension in the room on the Apprehensive

level, and made for some interesting, charged work on the

scene itself.

10 Last spring I made an audio recording of multiple interviews wherein I asked people how they seduced someone, asking them to focus in particular on what they do with their eyes and their hands. I then spliced together the different segments and played them over music as “instructions” for a male and female actor on stage—the male actor was to obey the male voices, the female actor, the female voices. The end result is usually the moment before an aching kiss.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 74 I then took the rest of the day to push out the boundaries of the scene with the Axis of Action and

Emotion11. The exercise is slow and can be difficult, but can yield majestic results. James and Amanda used the

Figure 3

exercise to get to the outer reaches of the scene emotionally. We walked out of the studio feeling like the scene was in pieces on the floor, and it forced us, or

11Based on the notion that vowels drudge up emotion, and consonants organize them into action, I have the actors perform the scene in an empty space four ways, illustrated in figure 3. The point of the exersize is to “roll out the pizza dough” of the emotional possibilities, and dilate each actor’s bandwidth of truth.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 75 forced me, to let it cook internally without being able to resolve it at the end of the work day.

Wednesday, January 14, 2004 Scene work, Scenes 4 & 5

We got down to brass tacks today, finally. This play is like a frozen lake on top of a volcano. You step out onto the dialogue and weeeee!, you hydroplane all over the place, but it has been clear from the beginning that there is roiling magma underneath which, if unacknowledged and ignored, would defeat the purpose of the theatrical event; if exorcized too early, would leave us with nothing for the last marathon scene; if it allowed to rise too close to the surface, would melt the ice and leave us with goo. This play is a massive emotional conundrum requiring the most ascetic and disciplined sensibility on the part of the actors.

We continued on scene 4 and busted open the beat structure. We found turning points and comic rhythms. We dwelled in the conflict and articulated the power dynamics.

Often, in Evan Yionoulis’s acting class, the two questions posed to the actors in a scene are (1) how do you want to make him feel?, and (2) in order to get back what?, with an eschewing of answers that were founded in plot details. I have used these questions as a reliable fallback in

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 76 rehearsal when I am lost, but I have realized that for this play (and perhaps subsequent plays I direct), a third question is necessary: (3) by getting him to do what?

This breakthrough, combined with an identification of what the true conflict is—that Girleen wants Father Welsh to see her as a full blown woman, and Father Welsh wants

Girleen to see him as simply a man—upshifted the metabolism of our rehearsal process and allowed me to finally conduct the proceedings with the confidence of a director fully inside the text.

Thursday January 15, 2004 Scene work: Scene 5 (The monologue), Scene six

Today was one of the days David Chambers was talking about in my critique last semester, when he talked about pornography. James Reynolds and I tackled the massive monologue at the fulcrum of the play. This is a particularly emotional scene for me—the idea of a priest begging from beyond the grave that two brothers get along—given my own dead father, a former priest, and my volatile relationship with my own brother.

Father Welsh is an onion. There are so many layers, and each just slightly different from the last, but when you get all the way in, you have something completely different than what you began with. His speech, nested in

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 77 the center of this profoundly baffling play, is deceptively straight forward, but as with the rest of this play, it is a landmine of ideas. It’s easy, in the face of lines like,

“…arguing over fecking Taytos and stoves and figurines is an arse brained argument…” to fall down the rabbit hole of symbolism and lose an hour discussing Taytos as a representation of the Irish relationship to food in the wake of the Famine, and the figurines as religion, and the stove as violence, or politics, or wealth. I am beginning to suspect that the moment I stray from what Liz Diamond describes as the “dogshit level of reality”, I begin to lose my grasp on the play. The macro-environment of ideas orbiting around this play is deeply seductive, but dangerous.

James was off book, so I had him rough through it a couple of times and listened for poetic opportunities. As he spoke, I noted that it all sounded very clean, and that he was lingering in the bottom half of his vocal register.

I wrote, “Free the upper half of your voice/wolf”. I also noted some klaxons, rhymes and useful alliteration. We then broke the speech down into manageable beats and tried to figure if this was indeed a suicide letter when written.

And if so, where in the speech does he decide to do it, and if not, why not? We landed on the epiphany dawning after

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 78 the says “I might be canonized after”, after which was required a glorious rush of deliverance, sending him charging into “Valene and Coleman, I’m betting everything one ye.” The exact circumstances surrounding the delivery of the speech/letter were befuddling, and would require multiple subsequent conversations. But with this firm foothold on comprehension, I wanted to delve into apprehension.

I began by seeking a sense of intimacy in James’s portrayal, seemingly shared by all ghosts with the living, whenever they appear in stories. I used an exercise I learned form Karin Koonrod, usually done with dialogues to promote intimacy among scene partners, in which James delivered the monologue sitting on the floor, back to back with me. I encouraged him to notice my breathing as he spoke and try to align himself with it. I put myself in the position of the other, as opposed to someone else in the room, because I needed to get inside this speech with him, and work emotionally along side. I was not prepared, however, for what the exercise did to me.

When he was finished, I had a difficult time putting words together, which, believe me, is extremely uncharacteristic, because I had allowed myself to float to a place of my own vulnerability as I breathed with James.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 79 He was more than gracious, knowing my backstory, and began to indeed work alongside me, as he seemed to see me doing.

This brought a sense of the Sacred into the room, so I mustered my courage and turned out the lights. This was a sharp contrast to an otherwise profane working atmosphere, in which I offered $5.00 to the first cast member to audibly fart. Jacob took instantly to this challenge and continued to be productive, upon his inevitable victory, for good measure. While goofy, this had a profound affect on the tone of our work, which was its intent. Not one to be outdone, Dave Bardeen developed a tradition of producing flatulence just before Jacob’s first lines in scenes 2 and

6. The rehearsal with James (who never succumbed to the pressure of contributing to the horn section) provided a stark contrast in tone to what we had established, and a great suppleness to our interaction.

I asked James to go through two scenarios with the monologue, continuing to explore the outer boundaries of what was available in the speech on the apprehensive level.

I asked him first, to imagine he were a drill sergeant addressing his pathetic troupes, and assembled the stage managers and dramaturgs into a line for him to source from.

After delivering it with such intimacy, he said he was

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 80 amazed at how much latent opportunity for tough love there was in the speech.

I then changed the orientation of the room and the scenario. Now, he was to imagine himself addressing a firing squad. And while speaking (going back to my earlier

“wolf” note about his vocal register), I asked him to yodel. He folded all of these stimuli together like a virtuoso and allowed himself to drop to a level of vulnerability I have never, in my life, witnessed from an actor on stage. I blindfolded him from behind as he spoke the line, “And if you wouldn’t be doing it for yourselves would you be doing it for me, now?”

When he was done, and stunned silence from everyone hung in the darkened room, I was dumbstruck. I very ungracefully and feebly hugged him from the side, and after pausing and searching for the right first thing to say; I suggested quietly we go on a break. James thanked me and wiped his eyes with the gauze I had used for a blindfold.

We stood outside smoking cigarettes and staring at the ground in near total silence. I couldn’t help feeling that

I was somehow failing him with every silent moment that ticked by. I felt like I was forcing him to telegraph to the room that what happened was okay. My thoughts flashed back to the punching bag and directorial pornography, and I

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 81 uttered to James that he should call it a day, kicking myself.

Friday, January 16, 2004 Scene work: scene 6

The boyos returned after a few days off and brought a familiar profanity back into the room. Since breaking into the play in scene four, my work has a new confidence that was missing in the initial scene work. There is a new integration of working towards comprehension and apprehension. The planes are becoming less mutually exclusive.

We began with my Subtext exercise12, and then ran scene

2 and scene 6 contiguously to discover the similarities and differences. We found the need to conceal the rising intensity, so that neither the fight between the boyos nor

Girleen’s speech had a detectable “goes-into”, as it is referred to in musical theatre.

We succumbed to the temptation to go “macro” today and discussed, for an extended period of time, Israel, and what the worst-case scenario—or “nightmare”—would be for it, all this vis-à-vis Valene’s management on Coleman. We alighted

12 The Subtext Exercise involves going through the scene and announcing your subtext before your actual line. I find it particularly useful when there is a wide gap between that which is said and that which is meant, combined with a need for the audience to laugh at the latter. The exersize can be painstaking as the actors fumble for the right words, and the danger is always putting them “in their heads”. But the benefits, if I can successfully dissuade them from slipping from the first person to the third (which is the inevitable tendency), can be a wondrous double intelligence in performance—a certain Brechtian control of themselves and the audience.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 82 upon loneliness as a major Achilles Heel for Valene and did

an extended experiment of Valene’s quotidian life in the

house when Coleman is not at home. As Jacob dropped into

the exercise, and the natural awareness of an audience lost

its weight, he sank deeply into despondency and boredom,

punctuated by welcome fits of fussy straightening. The

silence in the room without Coleman grew deafening, for

Jacob in particular and served as a visceral fuel for his

subsequent aggressive attacks in runs of the scene.

The exercise yielded a huge amount of data, for Jacob,

for me, and for the entire acting style of the production.

It drudged up latent issues for every character about their

relationship with mortality versus significance, and highlighted the difference between the American and the

European relationship to these opposing forces. I shared as much as I could from my experience of the Romantic Sublime

(Appendix C) in Ireland, and how it brought me to the edge of my own grappling with these massive and conflicting life forces.

As I watched Jacob lose his need to entertain us, and his need for our approval drain away, I had an important realization about the performance style of the piece as a whole. Roweena Mackay, one of the dramaturgs, recorded one of the statements on this I made that day:

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 83 “The more sympathy you give your characters, the worse off you’ll be. Make it ugly—exclude the audience and the artist—get out of the way of the thing itself. Let go of the need to be good.”

Having made it through the fulcrum of the play, past the granite-like first act and the gelatinous center scenes, we have a much stronger footing in rehearsal, and are trudging through the terrain with far fewer glances at the map.

Saturday, January 17, 2004

There are times over the course of this rehearsal process when I suspect that this play is a Western in disguise. These are the times when I am reminded of Sound

Designer Keith Townsend Obadike’s genius, for seeing it before anyone else. Scene 7, following that notion, is a massive shootout with language. It runs 32 minutes and is simply a back-and-forth dialogue between the brothers. It will require a massive reserve of energy on the part of the actors, and an openness to letting the scene work on them.

In acting class last year, Peter Francis James would describe getting dragged through a Shakespearean speech (in a good way) if you can harpoon the first thought. He referred to this phenomenon as the “Nantucket Sleigh Ride”.

This scene would require that kind of pourousness to

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 84 stimuli on the part of the actors, to allow themselves to be dragged by their emotions to the height of cruelty.

We have two full days to build this scene before we hit run-throughs, so we are focusing for this first day on the first half, before it gets violent. In my continuing effort to stave off the actors need to achieve

“correctness” or that which is good, I began with multiple exercise to begin the scene off balance.

We started by building a visceral understanding of that which connects the last scene and this one. We staged an improvisation of the boyos leaving for Father Welsh’s funeral. They chose to remain in the dazed and confused state that the news of his death had put them in, and created a silent dialogue of tentative emotional permission granting.

Exploring the verbal apologies throughout the scene as stepping stones in an otherwise rapidly flowing river of anger, we set up an exercise in which the brothers sat facing each other, engaging in the dialogue of the scene, while Roweena and I sat behind them, creating ever- intensifying mosquito noises in the ear of the actor to whom a story of wrong doing was being confessed. The buzzing would only stop when, at the end of the story, an

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 85 apology was delivered. In the middle of the exercise, Ron

Van Lieu, the incoming acting chair, popped in for a visit.

The next exercise was to simulate a press conference, with each character as a head of state, politically and symbolically apologizing for wrongdoings of their country towards the other. This was useful and extremely funny, in that it underlined and exploded the traces of passive- aggressiveness in the scene.

In the scene, the brothers recount wrongs done to the other and never confessed, as a way of purging their lifetime of hostility, and engaging in a certain Jungian

“depotentiation” of the other’s power to make them angry.

But the purge mutates into a binge, as the memories of sadistic behavior bring an undeniable pleasure to the confessor. I felt that the actors needed a muscular memory of the story they were telling, so we engaged in a long improvisation of each of the confessions, and explored the physicality of the brothers at each age in the stories recounted. Along the way, many questions were unearthed and answered about the shared history, which lead to a deeper confidence in their performance of the scenes, and an ability to fully release into playing.

The scene, just the first half before it explodes emotionally, is a marathon. It required a very

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 86 sophisticated ballet of playing the positive and, as we came to refer to it, “keeping the erection”.

The slippery issue of genre became foregrounded in our rehearsal of this scene, and it became necessary to distinguish as a group between realism and naturalism. I dusted off a handout from my first year Theory class with

Elinor Fuchs, which proved enormously helpful, at the end of our exploration of the scenes, in determining the structural DNA of the play stylistically——not so that we could follow it as gospel, but see where we were straying and where we were obeying the form.

Monday, January 19, 2004

Today we continued working with Rick Sordelet on the fights, and then finished the scene work of the play.

The end of this play is an impenetrable riddle. I am repeatedly confounded by the contrast between the ease of the read with the difficulty of dissecting the action. The script has an extraordinary sense of inevitability and velocity, the good, non-predictable kind, but the execution of it requires a delicate incorporation of all the given circumstances, akin to a house of cards. We keep having to go back to basics, and ask simple action based questions: how do you want to make him feel?, to get back what?, by getting him to do what? Ordinarily by this point in the

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 87 rehearsal process, as we approach the end of the play,

these topics need progressively less discussion. This play,

however, requires the ultimate humility and vigilance

against even the most obvious of assumptions.

As we tackled the end of the play, I needed to make

the actors confederate in my control of the experience of

the audience, which worked against their need to release

emotionally into the Nantucket Sleigh Ride required for the success of the scene. I needed them to deliberately delay the explosion of tension as long as possible, past, perhaps, its natural release point. This was a lot to ask, and the scene unraveled on multiple attempts. Down to the end, this play required more intercommunication with the audience than any other “fourth wall” play I have ever worked on. The requirement seems to be a translucency to the fourth wall; a presentational naturalism that acknowledges the audience and waits for its participation.

We all wanted to squeeze the hearts of the audience until they moaned with excruciation, and it required more discipline than any of us had anticipated. We enter our first run-through tomorrow.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 88 Evaluation of Production

This production was both an odyssey into the mind of a writer with whom I feel a deep connection, and an odyssey into myself, as a director, and as an Irish-American.

I write these words three months after the play was performed, and a strange thing has happened to me in that time. The performances were received very warmly by the audiences and by the members of the Drama School community.

I received potent feedback and very generous praise. I felt, in the end, like I had tackled every question I could find, and investigated it within an inch of its life. Once, during run-throughs, I even beat the punching bag within an inch of its life, right in front of the actors. I feel like

I achieved everything I set out to do, I exorcized my former self-serving need to direct (which is, using my

Yionoulis-based method of dissecting action in rehearsal: conquering the shame I felt on the day my father was buried, and get back the love from those people who were staring at me, by getting them to talk openly about their inner feelings—this is what actors in the rehearsal hall came to stand for); I investigated the Negative Space by putting “windows” in the fourth wall for the audience; and

I saw the powerful effects of encouraging actors to dwell

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 89 in despicability (so much so, that I now have a hard time stomaching performances that are even remotely self- aggrandizing).

The Lonesome West was the perfect thesis production for me, because it destabilized everything I thought I knew

I could do: my rampant use of metaphor was of no use to me in this play wherein only the most specific, exacting comment was useful, and expounding on big themes got us no where. I found that my usual knack for rhythm and working with what I hear were severely challenged, as I was forced to come to terms with the subordination of my imagined

“Irishness” to my concrete Americanness. It also reinforced some new very incipient philosophies I had begun to develop in my growth as an artist.

I had spent the year leading up to my production obsessively creating ways to make sure I see everything.

During my time here, I’d been so haunted, in the aftermath of my productions, by glaring inconsistencies or problems with structural integrity that seemed obvious to everyone but me, that I spent hours devising ways to never miss the obvious again. Appendix F is a representation of the ways in which I prepared for the production, simple charts I developed in my ongoing project to not miss anything, and decode and demystify every corner of directing. They are a

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 90 bit quixotic, I’ll be the first to admit, but they have been very useful to me. Their use allows me to relax in rehearsal, and to identify dormant opportunities for direction and insight. Using them, and infusing as much of that which is deeply personal from my fellow collaborators and myself, I feel confident that I can create very sound productions, by which audiences are compelled and moved and tickled and stimulated.

Feeling like the production was a touchdown, and like

I’d accomplished my goals and successfully chased my demons, I entered into an odd, Stepfordian serenity in the show’s aftermath. I felt that I had conquered my fears of directing, and, in the process, developed a reliable method

I can come back to for the rest of my working days. But slowly, over the last few months, that serenity has become very scary for reasons I am only beginning to understand.

While rehearsing the show, I applied to a grant program provided by the NEA and administered by TCG. I was selected as a finalist, and had my interview last Friday.

As I write this, I do not know if I will be a recipient. In the interview, one of the members of the panel, Ricardo

Kahn, from the Crossroads Theatre Company, seemed to get a sense of the above: that I had devised for myself a way to surgically analyze the text on one hand, and use personal

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 91 connections and details of the lives and thoughts of the collaborators to create a lively rehearsal room.

“But where’s the juice?” he asked me. He seemed to find it a bit haunting, like I’d covered all the right bases a little too tidily. The other members of the panel then jumped on board and tried to extract from me exactly what I feel passionate about, amidst all this research and development into the practice of directing itself.

And neither they, nor I could find it.

I left the interview feeling like they had identified the one thing I had not been seeing: that, since my thesis,

I have been in a crisis of passion. I had fallen so in love with creating a mess on the floor of the rehearsal room with questions and ponderings and autobiography, and then using my methods of analysis as a dust buster to tidy it all up. I was too much Virgo and not enough Libra (I am on the cusp, September 20).

Through finishing this document, however, I have gotten back in touch with the thing that makes my heart pump: rehearsing. On this production, I came of age in the rehearsal room. Rather than a place to where our interactions were driven by a subconscious management of the public perception of our talent, the place became a gymnasium for our souls. With a decided lack of self-

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 92 indulgence we worked to uncover the deep, glowing resonant core inside of this play, and inside of ourselves, and the audience responded in kind.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 93 Appendices

(A) bibliography (B) communications between myself and mr. mcdonagh (C) excerpts from my journal from my trip to ireland (D) photos of the show (E) costume sketches (F) my theories (G) brief autobiography (H) BIO

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 94 (A) BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cahill, Thomas. How the Irish Saved Civilization. New York: Doubleday. 1995.

Druid Theatre Company Website. http://www.druidtheatre.com

Fitzpatrick, Trish and Whilde, Tony. The Insiders Guide to Connemara, Galway, and the Burren. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan. 1992

Franks, Alan. “Playing with Fire” The Times (London) 22 June 2002: Features

Hoggard, Liz. “Interview - Martin McDonagh” The Independent (London) 15 June 2002: Features, 10-13

Internet Broadway Database. http://www.ibdb.com

Nightengale, Benedict. “The Sort of Renown that Would Make Any Troupe Green” The New York Times. 22 Feb. 1998: 2,4

Ross, Michael. “Bad Boy Back on the Block” Sunday Times (London) 12 July 1998: Features

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 95 (B) EXCERPTS FROM COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN MYSELF AND MR. MCDONAGH (some explicit language involved)

February 27, 2003

Dear Mr. McDonagh:

My name is Brendan Hughes, and I write to you in the hopes that I might be able to stage The Lieutenant of Inishmore as my director’s thesis production at the Yale School of Drama sometime next winter. I am in my second year, of a three-year program, and my three classmates and I are in the process of choosing our big final production to go up some time in our third year. I’ve read every goddamn play ever written in the last 3 months and nothing has had an effect on me like your play. A few nights ago, I finished it at midnight in my apartment here in New Haven and couldn’t speak.

The American media has been forcing shit burgers down my neck for the last two years about terrorism, and it’s all been abstract at best, bullshit at worst. The fate of this country has changed deeply in the last two years, and it wasn’t until I read your play that I could understand it. Every single person I know hates George Bush, but you’d never know we were here. Your play is the blessed way for me and some of my fellow students to deeply investigate the strange cocktail of sentimentality and psychosis involved in being a fundamentalist wackjob, and do so without having to listen to a talking head spoon feed us the wimpiest journalism in the world because his network is owned by a defense contractor.

My specialty lately has been comedy. I’m also known in this school as a bit of a card, so I’ve been pigeonholed as only being able to do comedy. The black humor of this piece is therefore perfect for me to show them I’ve got fangs. This would be an amateur production running five performances in New Haven, Connecticut sometime next winter. It’s pretty impressively budgeted, so we could do all of the special effects without chincing on them.

I saw Beauty Queen on Broadway and it was one of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life. I feel like I really GET it, and would love to give it a shot. I know the rights are locked, but I wonder if I could tug on your heartstrings to make a little exception. I’ve included my resume for your perusal.

Best regards, Brendan Hughes

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 96 March 21, 2003 hi brendan, thanks for your letter and gushing praise, etc. i'm checking with my agent about the logistics of your request re Lieutenant. they'll be in touch directly. it might be possible, we'll see. i think i've only ever passed through new haven. is it nice? any cute girls at yale? i'm actually heading off on a date right this minute. wish me luck. good luck with the war. this year i'm thinking of flying a plane into george bush's stupid fuckiing face. all the best, martin

March 22, 2003

Hey man-guy, Great to hear from you. I cannot tell you how much it would rock new haven to do that play. Thank you a trillion for considering it. New Haven is a strange town filled with strange architecture--everything at Yale looks like a church. It was built in the 1700's to look like it was built in the 1500's. I like to call it the "city of a dozen stories". And there are indeed many fly honeys. How was your date? You reminded me of when I asked my girlfriend out on our first date, I asked her answering machine out on a Tuesday to go out on a Friday, and she told my answering machine yes. And then we kept running into each other in that purgatory of four days in between and had nothing to say to each other because we couldn't commence fully sanctioned flirting until Friday night. I kept asking her where she was from to the point where we both knew I already knew that. Very strange. So I look forward to hearing from your agent. Thanks again, this is asthma attack level excitement! Yerz, Brendan

March 28, 2003 hi brendan, bad news, i'm afraid. my agents, both english and US, have been back to me saying no-go about a Lieutenant production (citing proximity in both time and place to a NY one). i think they'll be onto you directly with the specifics. anyway, sorry man. hope you're not too disapointed. all the best, martin

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 97 March 28, 2003

Hi Martin, Damn! Total bummer. Well, it's exciting it's coming to New York anyway. I'll be there with bells on (under my clothes). Than ks for getting back to me personally, that really means a lot. I've followed your plays for a while and connect deeply with them. I think I'll have another look at some of the others, they might be perfect. Lonesome West has an eerie resonance with me and my brother (especially given that our dad was a Roman Catholic priest when he fell in love with my mom (they burnt draft cards together and were tailed by the FBI, it's quite a love story)). Say, do you have any new stuff lying around you'd like to workshop? Or other things that need a an introduction to the states? Thanks again, Brendan

March 29, 2003 hiya, y'know, i always prefered Lonesome West to Beauty Queen, so maybe that one's something to think about. haven't got any stuff to workshop, i'm afraid. my motto is 'Keep writing it til it's perfect, then never listen to anyone elses opinion'. not quite, but kind of. all the best, martin ps. i'll let you know when Lieutenant's coming over.

April 2, 2003

Hey bud. Re-reading Lonesome West. Damn that's a good play. I designed a poster for it in Boston last year (the Sugan Theatre Company) but couldn't myself see it because I was down here, so I only know it on paper. But what a howl it is. I'm thrilled beyond words that Lieutenant will come to this country. We need it. I feel like that and Blasted are the new world order in this bullshit fools paradise we have over here. The news isn't even watchable about the current war. The spin makes me dizzy. Fucking Rumsfeld can't even make eye contact with the press, that weasel. Hey if my thesis coincides with Lieutenant's premiere it'd be great to have you up to New Haven if you're interested. It's just a stone's throw from New York. Or alternately if it doesn't coincide, I'd love to assist in any way I can on the Lieutenant production--it's always been my dream to work with squibs. Is there someone I can send my resume to? I hope this finds you well, man. Yerz, Brendan PS What is The Banshees of Inisheer?

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 98 April 3, 2003 hi brendan, sure, if i'm around and free i'd head down to new haven, just can never say for sure til it happens. don't know when or where Lieutenant'll be happening. will let you know (dunno where you'd send a resume etc, ain't all that stuff real unionised? i dunno...) banshees of inisheer is, or will be, the 3rd part of the Aran Islands trilogy (with Cripple and Lieutenant). there is a version of it, but it's a pile of fucking shit and will never see the light of day. i'll go back to it someday, but not for a while. if you're doing Lonesome, just remember that the stove is pretty much the fifth character, so you've really got to make that fucker EXPLODE!! all the best, martin

April 4, 2003

Hey Martin! So I've decided that Lonesome West would indeed be a perfect thesis for me. I couldn't be more excited. It's like fate, I tell ya, the brother stuff, the priest stuff, it's perfect. And your imagery goes deep. I can't wait to blast that stove to shit. I'm going to try to head over to Ireland this summer to check it all out--I've never been if you can believe it, so this is the perfect excuse. In a couple of weeks I'll know when exactly the show will be and will send that info along. Would it be all right if I occasionally shoot you a question about the play as it unfolds for me? All right, daddio, more news as it develops.

Yerz,

Brendan

April 5, 2003 that's cool, brendan. feel free to ask me whatever, but keep 'em simple, i'm a bit thick. also there's about half a page in the final scene you should cut out, to do with the 'Does he have a bullet in his hand' bit. i'll let you know nearer the time. it's up to you, but when we performed it we realised it was kind of irrelevant. if you're heading for ireland, aim for the west coast (Galway) rather than dublin. dublin could be anywhere in some ways, galway's pretty cool, and close to some nice countryside (leenane and all that) all the best, m

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 99 April 8, 2003 hey Martin, thanks for the email. I'm interested to know about why the bullet moment didn't work. It's riveting on the page. But I'd be happy to incorporate any revisions like that you'd like to make, whatever you feel is necessary. Thanks for the Galway tip--incidentally, I've just begun rehearsing a role in an upcoming original production in the Yale Cabaret (an after hours dinner theatre run by Drama School students of which I'm the Artistic Director for the year) in which I portray a guy from Galway. It was written by a playwright student here, Jami O'Brien, who writes brilliant and ferociously funny plays about Boston Irish Catholics, of which both she and I are two. In any case I hope things are great with you and I'm excited to get it all underway! Be well, Brendan

Hey martin, I just spoke to the Managing Director of the Yale Rep, who told me we can fly you here and put you up if you'd like to come see the show! I'll let you know the moment I know when it is. I hope it works out and you're so inclined! I'll be in touch, Brendan

April 9, 2003 b- bullet moment - we realised that at that point in the play, it isn't about that kind of business any more. it's simply, quietly, about...

I want to kill you, coleman.

Ah don't be saying that now, val. (TRUE, SAD)

It's true. I want to kill you. (A TERRIBLE, SAD REVELATION TO HIM)

Try so.... (NOT CARING IF BOTH OF THEM DIE) broken, he drops the knife (BUT, I GUESS, CARING IF BOTH OF THEM DIE) etc, etc. the gun business just got in the way, for us. so we cut half a page of dialogue and just went to that. very slow. very cold. worked great. i should've cut it out of the printed version - never got around to it. i will next edition. i'll tell you the cuts nearer the time. anyway, it's up to you. thanks for the offer of coming over. it's really nothing to do with a free flight or anything like that, it's just about where i happen to be in the world, and whether i'm free. if i'm in australia, I probably won't come. if i'm in new york, i probably will. y'know? all the best, martin

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 100 April 12, 2003

Hey Martin, That moment you sent is incredible. Brilliant and sad, I can see how the bullet might jam the circuits. I can't wait for the other revisions! That's really exciting. I'll soon find out about the dates for next year and let you know, that's cool about coming if you can. I hope it works out. Do you travel a lot for your work? I'll be in touch soon ! Brendan

May 15, 2003 hey man, check out this site. FINALLY the reaction i was looking for! M

[the following was found at a hyperlink he sent me in the above email]

Offensive anti-Catholic play performed by high school students, produced & directed by teachers.

Imagine being an Irish Catholic parent and bringing your family to a play performed by the drama class at your child's high school. The play turns out to be an obscene, degrading depiction of Irish people, Catholic priests, and the Catholic religion. This happened in Newton, Massachusetts, and and much of the town is shocked and outraged.

"The Cripple of Inishmaan" by London-based British playwright Martin McDonagh takes place on the Irish island of Inishmaan in 1934. However, as C.J. Doyle of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts observed, the play is not a work of any historical legitimacy, but a vulgar attack on Irish Catholics.

It was presented at Newton North High School on the evenings of Oct. 25, 26, and 27 of 2001. There was immediate outcry, but it took additional weeks to obtain a script from the school. Since then, this has been covered in both local and even national press, and citizens have loudly complained to school officials -- and have been ignored!

This is in a town where there is not only a large percentages of Irish Catholics in the school system, but where religious expression has been zealously purged from the schools by the "progressive" school administrators and public officials.

Reaction from C.J. Doyle, Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts:

"The Cripple of Inishmaan is an extraordinarily vulgar, profane play, laced with obscenities. There are about 64 uses that I can count of the Irish variation of the F-word. But it's also something that's very, very anti-clerical and anti-Catholic. It portrays Catholic priests as molesters, as sexual predators, as gropers. It is actually so vulgar and explicit that it talks about the genitalia of Catholic priests, about the sexual organs of Catholic priests. It portrays the Irish as extraordinarily crude, vulgar, un-Christian, uncharitable people. It's a very negative, nihilist, hostile view of the Irish. "It's written by a fellow named Martin McDonagh who despite his name is actually British -- he's a Londoner, and he's attached to the Royal National Theatre in London. He apparently has a history of writing anti-Catholic, Catholic-bashing plays and also has a history of writing things that are extremely vulgar.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 101 "Besides the fact that the play is an insult to Catholics and to Irish-Americans it's also a lie. It's set in Ireland of 1934. And, of course, Ireland of the 1930s was the Ireland of Eamon de Valera, the famous founding father of Ireland, who was one of the strongest Catholic statesmen of the 20th century. It was Ireland of the Devotional Revolution. It was Ireland when Catholic faith and practice was really at a peak in the country. To imagine the Irish country folk -- our own grandparents and parents who came from rural Ireland -- as using an obscenity for every other word is really quite unimaginable. This obscene, sex-obsessed portrayal of them is really a very corrupt, revisionist attempt to impose the cosmopolitan vulgar, secular values of the cultural elites upon Irish Catholic history, and it's a lie. It's a piece of mythology. And it's also extraordinarily insensitive to Catholics. "There's a lot of talk in Newton about tolerance and the need to respect diversity. Well, doesn't respect for diversity extend to the religious sensibilities to Irish Americans and Roman Catholics?"

May 15, 2003

Unbe-fucking-lievable. You can't BUY publicity like that! Those people are complete idiots. Did you look at the rest of their site? They're having a book burning in Newton Centre this Friday. Newton is about 10 miles from my mother's house in Dorchester. And about a billion socio-economic miles. We used to call it Snoot-un growing up. The kids in the high school drive around in golf carts. I knew some of them growing up. Hey, so it seems Lonesome West is just about confirmed to play February 3-8, 2004. I'll keep you posted on when it actually firms up. Is there any Lieutenant in America news? Hope you're well, man guy Brendan

December 17, 2003 hey brendan, hope it all goes well. i'm off to galway. my new play's brilliant, you can probably get it on amazon - The Pilowman. merry christmas. M

December 17, 2003

Hey Martin!

Great to hear from you. Congratulations on the Pillowman, it sounds fantastic. I will definitely get a copy of that. I just started rehearsals on Monday with a design presentation, and yesterday had one on ones with each of the actors in a bar nearby--much more comfortable than a rehearsal room in my opinion. The cast is perfect. It's always a risk around here because the cast is assigned by the dean, but he gave me just the right people. Today we finally have the readthrough, ooh, and I made that cut of the bullet moment you suggested. Does that mean the Valene's line at the end remains intact when he discovers them?

I just got back from Galway myself. I went for a week at the end of November. That place is absolutely fantastic. I stayed in a B&B next to the dog track, and met my girlfriend there who lives in Paris. We drove all around Connemara

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 102 and up into Leenane. I've never seen anything like it in my life. The mountains, and the vistas, and the loneliness of the houses dotting them, was overwhelming. And I never knew sheep could climb cliffs.

After Galway we drove down through the Burren and ended up in Dingle. It was all so amazing looking I almost started to get beauty build-up and couldn't take it in. It was a fantastic trip. My first time there, and I will certainly be back.

Oh, hey, there's a little dispute over here about the pronunciation of Valene's name. I assume the emphasis is on the first syllable, but does the "A" rhyme with 'gate' or 'cat'? And finally, I've noticed there are slightly different versions of the text ("five year olds" vs. "young gassurs"), is there a more definitive version?

Thanks and have a great trip!

Merry Christmas to you and yours,

Brendan

December 19, 2004 hi brendan, i head to galway in about 4 hours. glad youu had a good time there. answers.... valene as in 'cat' (it's short for Valentine). yeah, cut "he'd've fecking shot me too. he'd've shot his own brother too. on top of his dad. on top of me stove." use '5 yr olds' instead of gasurs'. i think the definitive version is the one in Martin McDonagh Plays One, by methuen, but i dunno if you can get it there. it should be more or less the same as what you have. one change i recall is 'I'd be as scared of a batter from a LEMON', instead of 'worm'. good luck with it all, and merry christmas.

Martin

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 103 January 29, 2004

Hey Martin--

Congratulations on your Olivier nomination!! I just received the Pillowman from Amazon I can’t wait to read it!

Just came home for dinner from a tech rehearsal. Holy shit, what a play. I regret not having been more in touch over the course of the rehearsal process, but I can’t tell you what a fantastic experience it has been to knock around inside this play. This play is so tight, and so sound, I knew I didn’t need to bother you with questions that popped up because if we just continued to dig deeper, we always found the answer. Or we’d elect to leave the question standing and feed off the energy of its uncertainty.

It’s so easy to fall down the rabbit holes of conversation around the symbolism in the play. We did a lot of investigation around the uncanny resemblance this play bares to peace processes in the world. We also wandered around in Cain and Able and the Two Thieves (by the way, I noticed “A Skull in Connemara” is a direct quote from Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot—Beckett has been useful to us as well, in terms of honoring the musicality of your pauses).

As we would stare at our navels, or assign Valene to one thing and Coleman another—like Catholic self-oppression, or Protestants and Catholics, or England and Ireland, or even Israel and Palestine— we quickly learned that it was pointless to be reductive like that, that it was never one-for-one, you always complicated it ingeniously. When we got expansive, the play would shrink and hide from us, but when we just focused on the dogshit level of reality, just these dudes being ferocious with each other, and just this priest and this girl, the play became like a clarion bell for the audience to have these epiphanies on their own.

When we started focusing so specifically, the world of Leenane exploded for us. I can’t tell you how amazing the moment in rehearsal was, when we were working Girleen’s speech (she IS gorgeous, by the way), and I told her to use the faces she sees in the audience as the dead (not direct address, just for her to source off of) and we realized, from Skull, that she was staring at all the people who ever died in Leenane. That they were all in the lake, and that it is truly the only way out.

And the stove completely fucking explodes. The blank we’re using sends a flare out of the front of the gun, and then we have six charges of pyro and neumatic cylinders in the stove so it completely comes apart. We tried it last night for the first time. It is one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen in a theatre. I can’t believe we’re opening next week! If you happen to have plans to be stateside, I would love to have you. My family is throwing a party at a nearby restaurant on the 7th after the show. And Yale can flip the bill for you if you’re able to make it. If not, I totally understand, and would love to send you a video (even though theatre on video is death by dentist).

I hope this finds you well, brother.

Yerz,

Brendan

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 104 February 3, 2004 hi brendan, yeah, just stick to the dogshit reality of it. for, if i may quote mr ingmar bergman, "Symbolism's for fags, man." it really is just about two guys hitting each other. and the Suicide Christ as our only hope and salvation, of course. but, really, if you ever meet myself and my brother, you'll know this ain't a symbolic play. don't think i'll be over to see it, though, sorry. someday, though, someday. give my best to everyone in the cast, would you? be careful with those guns. love, martin

February 3, 2004

Hey martin!

Thanks for the thoughts. Bergman is right. My brother and I are very similar as well. It's funny you mention the gun. We had a live blank round find its way, terrifyingly, into the chamber in a rehearsal despite all our precautions and it happened to accidentally discharge during Valene's tirade two minutes before it would have gone into the back of Colemen's head. That made for some tense days, but now everything (knock on wood) is running smoothly.

Hey I do have one question about the ending. The cat playing Valene is fucking incredible, an amazing comedian but really moving when he wants to be, and we have tried the last part a bunch of ways. I can totally solve this one on my own, but I am curious... Does something change forever, or will this fighting between them go on and on 'til the end of time. My instinct is that the chord to resolve on is a minor one, or a minor seventh if you play guitar or piano, as opposed to a major one.

And did you find American audiences to ease into this play differently than Irish ones? Is there some way that first scene with Coleman and Father Welsh played differently here than it did over there?

I will definitely pass on your best to the cast. I look forward to crossing paths with you someday. I hope this finds you well and congrats again on the Pillowman. Fuckin' A. yerz, Brendan

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 105 February 4, 2004 hey brendan, the ending. it's a minor key thing, maybe only seen in valene's eyes even, or in his head, but i think something is changed IN HIM, at least. maybe in coleman too. for me, after V says he won't buy the fecker a pint, well, he will buy fecker a pint, despite himself. the priest (and girleen to an extent) HAVE changed something. half the audience won't get it no matter what you do, though. they never did, they never will. just like they never got the sadness in Peckinpah's stuff. the first scene. just boom straight into it. don't give the audience a chance to fucking breathe. We tried to play it slow and sombre once and it just doesn't hold. this ain't fucking chekhov, kid! all the best again, martin

March 23, 2004 (from Martin) So how'd it go, Killer?

(my response) Hey there!

Dude, congratulations on the Olivier award, that's fantastic. And that The Pillowman is going to Broadway, and finally Lieutenant comes to town! Hot damn, I can't wait for those. I'm moving to New York in May so I'll be able to catch all the action. For a project in my directing seminar just after the show we had to do mock production pitches to producers and I did one for The Pillowman. That play is bone-rattling and hilarious. I've never had my own need for narrative so sabotaged so deliciously. I mean how brilliant to go after people's own stories about their own shitty childhoods. Fucking great, and Broadbent must be a howl with the deaf Chinese boy story. The script about dropped out of my hands when the green girl came in. My friend Rolin Jones saw it (a great playwright in his own right), and just lost it about the play. Said he met you in the lobby afterwards.

And the show. I suppose I can be totally honest with you about the reaction to it, since you deserve most of the credit. Ordinarily, when people ask I play it down, but...it was like nothing I have ever seen at this school, or heard of.

Before I came here I ran a little theatre company in Boston and we would have the big shows that fit together well enough for a big audience reaction, but that was because the house was tiny, and filled with friends of the cast. But the Lonesome West played to the public, as well as the drama school, and people completely lost it. The professor of playwrighting told me it was the best director's thesis he'd seen in years. The registrar, who's been here 25 years, said it's the best PRODUCTION she's ever seen here, period. Including Yale Rep shows. It got standing ovations and the house was filled with the kind of laughter that the audience eventually couldn't control anymore, where the

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 106 subtlest nuance from Valene or Coleman would send them over the edge. And that would set them up for the devastation at the end. The actors were incredible at learning each audience, and modulating their performances. And their accents were spectacular.

And all the while I was beside myself. I had the most challenging process of my life working on that show. When I first read it I thought I knew exactly what to do with it, but when i got into the thick it was sooo tricky and fascinating to get just right. It seemed, as they performed, that more so than in other plays, the audience played a crucial role. That the fourth wall was not quite as opaque as one might think. The intercommunication between them and the audience was so intimate, even though the house was big (400 seats), that as I watched the shows, I would see people in the audience turn to each other mouths agape. I have been walking around in a daze ever since. I think I mentioned that my dad was a Catholic priest, and i have a similar relationship with a brother. Well, when my mom showed up with 20 people to see the thing they were dumbstruck by it. They just sat, stunned and in silence afterwards. My dad died in 1980, so the monolgue--with a priest begging his sons, so to speak, to get along from beyond the grave--had a particular impact on my family.

Hey, I'd love to send you a program, reviews, posters and some photos if you're interested. Should I send them through Rod Hall?

Also, wit h your permission, I'd love to contact Wilson Milam to see if he might need assistance on Leiutenant. I'd just die to be involved in that and the Pillowman.

I hope this finds you well and in the throws of celebrating your new well- deserved Olivier, Brendan

March 23, 2004 hi fella, wow, sounds fantastic. congratulations brendan. Almost makes me rethink quitting theatre forever. but not quite. sure, get in touch with wilson if you like. although I usually the director's assistants to be cute brunettes, there's no harm in trying.

(NB: Lieutenant going to NY isn't definite yet. Gotta decide in the next coupla weeks) well done again, martin

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 107 (C) EXCERPTS FROM MY JOURNAL FROM MY TRIP TO IRELAND

November 26, 2003 11:45 PM GMT Ardawn House, Galway

I arrived early this morning and found it alarming simple to go through customs. After I got my bags from baggage claim, I was faced with the choice to go through the green gate or the red gate, based on whether I think my bag should be inspected.

We woke up at 11-ish and rented a car back at the airport, having traveled there courtesy of Anthony the cab driver, who told us about his relations in the States. While I waited in the lobby of her hotel, there was a group of eight Irish 20-somethings, smoking and filling out a strange form together. The way they talked to each other, no one was performing. I could not detect a pecking order for the life of me. There was a constant fluid dialogue about the subtextual nature of questions like "your partner may, in your absence, use your card under certain circumstances.

The drive from Shannon to Galway took two hours, and was a tightrope walk. The car is small and a standard, which you shift with your left hand. The country lanes are damn narrow and Kate yelped in fear when I would put myself where I normally sit on the road. Another coat of paint and we'd have been goners squeezing through a truck filled intersection in Ennis.

We got to our current B&B unharmed and the proprietor, Mike, showed us around and gave us a lot of advice about what to do.

Galway is amazing. The whole island reminds me of Puerto Rico, oddly, and City Center Galway feels like Old San Juan meets Quincy Market. We ate at a god damn vegetarian restaurant and then found The Quays pub. We saw "In America" by Jim Sheridan. I was totally unprepared for the beauty and emotional devastation that I experienced watching that movie. I'm going to make my whole cast watch it.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 108 November 27, 2003-Thanksgiving 9:40 PM Ardawn House, Galway

Today we drove along the coast through County Connemara. I am over-saturated with beauty. As Dave Scharfenberg says, this place is 'absurdly green'. This island reminds me of Puerto Rico on the coast, and Nevada inland. I was aghast and agog at the scope and scale of the hills and mountains. The hills were like desert beauts covered in grass, dotted with death defying sheep. Some of which must have been using carabineers, and wearing fleece. Actually, all of them were wearing fleece.

We drove through massive vistas of bog and lonely farmhouses. What struck me deeply was the amount of stone walls running in jagged lines and demarking tiny patches of green. It seems like the entire country was rocks and over centuries they were piled to contain the buried beauty and passion of what's hidden underneath. It reminded me of the English policy during the Great Hunger of automatic subdivision of and among all of a farmer's sons, ensuring that each generation would be poorer than the last--with the stipulation that if one son should choose to convert to Protestantism, he would get all the land automatically. Thus would the English promote brotherly hostility and self-oppression among the colonized, and make resentment a national pastime. The more I saw these stone walls carving the grass today, the more I came to think of the brothers on Lonesome West as simply being both Catholic, self- oppressing lunatics. They are brothers, there is no oppressor. There is only each other.

The drive became death defying on our way back into Galway, when night fell and cars turned their lights on in my eyes. I drove over some orange pylons on the side of the road and did my best to conceal my abject terror. Every pair of headlights I saw, I would designate as my executioner.

At one point today, we pulled down a side road, and stopped in front of a man's house just as he was getting onto his bike. He said hello and we did, with our cameras in our hands. Everything about his body language seemed to say, "Please don't make me be rustic right now." And when we went into the bar in Leenane--quite possibly the most non- descript town he could have chosen--it was like we were two known murderers, showing up to the family reunion of our victims. I know I have long whiskers, and maybe everyone

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 109 else is far less sensitive to subtext and vibe, but DAMN. I want to needlessly take cabs just to talk to people. Maybe tomorrow.

November 30, 2003 4:08 PM GMT Murphy's Pub, Dingle

On Friday, we went to another smelly Internet cafe and then found the Town Hall Theatre. The folks in the front let me in and we found it to be the perfect sized theatre. About the size of the Agassiz Theatre in Harvard. No more the 12 rows of 12 with a little balcony but great sight lines from the back row of the balcony.

We then went to University College Galway, where we found the student union and sat amidst the din, the legs of our pants soaked to the knee from the rain.

We then walked by St. Patrick's Cathedral and decided to go in. It was very quiet, very rocky and very simple. Perhaps because it has so little to compete with, Catholicism has a 'just is' quality to it here.

That night, I went to the dog track next door to our B&B. I paid eight euro to get in and was confounded by the system. There were a lot of people getting very quiet every few minutes, and 7 guys in front of dry erase boards (one of which said Hughes) out on the track. Trying as hard as I could to understand the odds, I bet 2 Euro on a random trifecta and lost. Then stood around trying to record the accents of old men who would talk more quietly when I approached, even though I was pretending my recorder was a cell phone.

I went back to the room after about 20 minutes, after I bet on the dog with the best odds to show and watched it come in last. We went for an unsuccessful jaunt through downtown Galway looking for a friendly pub. I couldn't get settled and felt nothing but paranoia whenever I walked in. We finally went back to one of the first candidates. I decided to stride into the place with a smile, thinking that if I seemed like a hail-fellow-well-met I would be greeted as such. The only seats were two empty stools across from some old men. Kate got settled and I went to the bar for some whiskey. While there I spied a woman looking at Kate and then the old men and laughing sinisterly. Christ, I thought, there's no fucking escape, my paranoia was right.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 110 The next day we got in the car and headed south to find the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher. The car ride was fun, and the scenery was insane. Sometimes it was like being on Mars. The Burren is a craggy, barren place where the entire landscape is rock, or cow, or crashing wave, or swirling cloud.

We went to the Cliffs of Moher and were mind boggled at the scope of them. She reminded me that the Romantic Sublime is the feeling of being overwhelmed by nature to the point of annihilation. We could see Inisheer from the castle at the top of the cliff. Above it was a heavy rain cloud that I watched break open. We hustled back to the car to avoid getting drenched and hit the road fast. We had a system that whenever we came to a turn, she would say "look right, stay left".

The sun came out while it down poured on our windshield and she wondered aloud if there would be a rainbow. "It would be behind us and to the left," I said, not knowing how I knew. She looked, laughed and told me to pull over. There were two. And they were complete. And ridiculous. This country is so beautiful that one eventually experiences beauty build-up. The result of the romantic sublime is ultimately crankiness. You want to tell the knolls and the dales and the sheep that you know, you know you are pointless, you know you are insignificant, you know the sheep and the dales will outlive you, that the clouds have never heard of you and couldn't give a shit if they did.

I am pointless. The clouds will never hear of me. I'll never be as important as the rocks in the Burren that make the waves crash. Hurting people means nothing, but neither does making them feel good. Pleasure delays the inevitable. I am no match for God.

The drive to Dingle was 3 hours of absurd beauty, of a different character than the Burren and the Lonesome West. The whole drive looked like a bad Holiday Inn painting. I mean it just looks fake. Call me cynical, but thank god the farmers identify their sheep by spray painting horrible Duran Duran colors on their wool.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 111 (D) PHOTOS OF THE SHOW

David Bardeen as Coleman Connor James Lloyd Reynolds as Father Welsh

Jacob Knoll as Valene Connor Amanda Cobb as Girleen Kelleher

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 112 Father Welsh and Coleman discuss life after Coleman’s father’s funeral

Valene points out his favorite saint figurines, now melted by Coleman, to Father Welsh

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 113

Valene rips off Coleman’s hat during a fight Valene preens by his new stove

The brothers fight over a despondent Father Welsh Valene rages at Coleman, who is eerily calm

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 114 The brothers share a rare laugh at Father Welsh’s real first name “Roderick” which they learn from his suicide note.

Coleman learns of Valene’s long past sabotage of his only chance at love, with Alison O’Hoolihan

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 115 After Tom Hanlon’s funeral, Father Welsh tells Girleen he’s leaving Leenane tonight

Left without options, Valene sniffs his finger and closes act one

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 116 Girleen cods Father Welsh as Coleman sneers at Valene’s mail

Girleen threatens Valene, calling him “the king of stink-scum fecking filth bastards, ya bitch feck, Valene”

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 117 (E) COSTUME SKETCHES & LIGHTING CHEAT SHEET

Costume designer Chloe Chapin produced the following costume sketches. The lighting design cheat sheet, illustrating the systems used and lighting ideas, is by Gina Scherr.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 118 (F) MY THEORIES

What follows are the “theories” I have been working on for a year in preparation for the production, and including a few that have followed since and are still being developed.

1) Spark Ignition through Friction in the Four Elements

My idea here is that there are four ingredients to the theatrical event: language, transaction, time and space. Additionally, there are four levels of conflict in any given situation: a character with themselves, a character with the other characters, and character with the world, and the world with itself. My theory is that an audience will be compelled forward by creating friction on these different planes, within the four elements. Previously in my directing career, I have focused primarily on character-to-character conflict with transaction only. I use this chart to open my vision to include these other elements.

2) Can you be Sexy and Funny at the Same Time?

This separates characters (and sometimes actors) into three separate groups, in an effort to figure out how to navigate the tension between being sexy and being funny.

3) The Axis of Action and Emotion

This is the chart I used in rehearsal.

4) Method of Plot Analysis

This is the breakdown I use to dissect plays.

WORKS IN PROGRESS (handwritten notes):

5) The Speed and Temperature of a Character

6) The Collision of Esteems

7) Dilating the Bandwidth of Truth

8) The Floating Iceberg of Director/Actor Collaboration

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 119 SPARK IGNITION THROUGH FRICTION OF THE FOUR ELEMENTS FOUR THE OF SPARKFRICTION THROUGH IGNITION

tools indicators tools indicators tools indicators tools indicators • • • • • intelligence maturity, collective • in imagery of patterns and nature • cultural of nature and existence • • • • • • sanity of level • grammar • self of fate on statements objective • philosophy percieved • monologues and meditations • made observations • speech of dynamics • consonance of hardness • length vowel • tempo for battle or of control • rhythm of symphony or contrast • • • size vocabulary in contrast • use language in contrast • of level elemental of friction • poetic of knowledge percievable • vowels of level stress • consonants of level stress • speech of tempo • speech of rhythm • assonance and alliteration • images of command • average syllable • length sentence • construction poetic • and wisdom of all inhabitants all of wisdom and language all slang and idioms others and fire) water wind (earth imagery spoken as construction and forms LANGUAGE TRANSACTION • • • • • unrest of level • (reversals) world of mutability • in violence or military of presence • climate economic and political • span life average • justice of level • • • • • • scruples • economics, regarding position • landscape political in placement • wisdom of level • predictions • secrets hidden of proximity surface • intimacy of sense • threat and danger of sense • props emblematic • world material of use contrasting • exchange of temperature • authority of friction • class of friction • information of rate exchange • action of connectivity • response and listening of level • thought of rate • of stoccato) vs. (legato musicality • action of rate • gesture/gestis • contact eye of frequency • selection action • actions successive of size relative • vulnerability vs. strength • vs. truth with engagement • others vs. self-interest of level • everyday life of civilians of life everyday family and religion race, gender, decision-making deception VS. VS. VS. VS. • • • • • • • • life daily of metabolism • time of behavior • • • • • • • • • through acceleration of level • ratio age to maturity • • pauses of frequency • the of value character’s each • transactions of rhythm • dialogue of tempo • • • • life daily of metabolism percieved • pauses and beats of indications • • existence of metabolism • thought of rate • making decision of tempo • making decision of rhythm • • • • • past vs. present with engagement • stages of man of stages time other’s TIME • comfort in negative spce negative in comfort • ratio standing to sitting • stage on others from distance • walls to orientation and distance • positioning of strength • • • • doorways in spent time of length • posture • • • • • • • • • wear-and- and travel of rapidity • space of behavior • • • • • • • • • • over possessiveness of level • • • walls to orientation • other each from distance • movement of friction • • • dynamics spoken • orientation spacial of indications • text the in contact of indications • and corners and interiors room vs, tear factor on inhabitants on factor tear obkects material SPACE CAN A PERSON BE SEXY AND FUNNY SIMULTANEOUSLY?

WIT EGO INTELLIGENCE EMOTION AGGRESSION SELF-ESTEEM CHARISMA

Often Creator Humanity • Small High Low Moderate High Low (centered in the Head) Occasional Receiver

Occasional Receiver Religiosity • Healthy Moderate High Low Moderate Moderate (centered in the Heart) Seldom Creator

Often Receiver Sexuality • Robust Low Moderate High Low High (centered in the Groin) Never Creator THE AXIS OF ACTION AND EMOTION EMOTION

LOVE • long vowels • from the groin • legato movement INDIFFERENCE • slow tempo • proximate space

CRITICAL APPRECIATIVE • hard consonance • soft consonance

ACTION • from the head • from the heart • stocatto decisions • legato decisions • fast tempo • slow tempo • distant space • proximate space

RAGE • short vowels • from the chest • stoccato movement • fast tempo • distant space play playwright date

PREMISE what would happen if...

CONTROLLING IDEA meaning, based on the end...

VALUE SPECTRUM negation of THEMES/QUESTIONS forces at odds, why now... primary contrary contradictory negation

PROTAGONIST(S) ANTAGONIST(S) (-IC FORCES)

INCITING INCIDENT event that sets the plot in motion OBLIGATORY SCENE based on the inciting incident

PLOT COMPLICATIONS the protagonist expects... but gets...

CRISIS the choice between 2 positives or 2 negatives or both...

+ or

- or

CLIMAX the making of the choice...

RESOLUTION consequences of the choice... (G) BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

My parents were one of those one in a million marriages. They would admit to each other years after they met that it had been love at first sight, but could not at the time, because he was a Roman Catholic priest. She had come back to Boston from Texas, where she had volunteered for VISTA and mistakenly married the only other 21-year-old in Laredo. Now she was a divorcee with two kids, a welfare check, and an anti-war conscience. He led a hippie parish, had a very thick file with the FBI and started the Walk for Hunger.

I was conceived in an Emerson Dorm under the flop comet Kohotek. They were dorm parents after their marriage, but would soon move to a commune where I spent my first ten years. The place was twenty miles outside of Boston and had been the summer estate of the doctor who invented rubber gloves. Though we were piss-poor (my father made political slide shows for a living, exposing corporate greed), I had a giant field and deep woods all around me growing up. Plunging deep into the woods late at night has served me well as a director, because it made me feel safe digging deep into problems.

Five years after my father’s sudden death in 1980, my mother remarried. My stepfather was in the middle of a meteoric rise at the Boston Globe and would ultimately be their Editorial Editor at his death in 1992. We all moved to Boston from the country in 1985, and I went, at ten, from bumpkin to inner city punk. I attended Boston Latin School, which is the oldest school in the country (founded in 1635), where I discovered theatre in the drama club and played Cassio in Othello before I had even been assigned my first Shakespearean play in English class.

My relationship with college was staccato and I spent more time on directing projects outside of class than class itself. I learned very quickly about navigating bureaucracy and attacking opportunity, even when it wasn’t really there. After my freshman year, I knew I needed something more intense and real life, so I joined City Year—an urban Peace Corps for young adults. In City Year I gained a political awakening. I taught a computerized antiprejudice curriculum to sixth graders in Boston, and committed myself—as my mother had in VISTA—to combating the unequal distribution of wealth. We used skits to communicate messages, and in a corps-wide contest I was named National Skitmaster. After City Year and a little more college, I was handed the keys to a theatre space because I was in the right place at the right time. My whole world became tiny, and contained in this little 80-seat black box in the boon docks of Somerville. I became a theatrical monk for four years, working tirelessly in this love affair I had with a building and, ultimately, and art form. After four years, with an entire organization built beyond what I ever imagined at first, I knew it was time to spread my wings. So I applied to grad schools. Asking the universe if I should be a director. I was accepted at Yale School of Drama, Harvard’s ART Institute, and Columbia, which offered me a scholarship, all despite my lack of a B.A. I chose Yale and have spent the last three years in New Haven among the most talented people I have ever met.

In May, I will move to New York City and begin my career in earnest.

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Thesis Casebook by Brendan Hughes 120