Martin McDonagh is mad, poetic, outrageous, inflammatory, and sentimental as he pushes linguistic boundaries beyond Mamet in his A Behanding in Spokane, now on Broadway. Profanity splashes, sloshes and drips, inundating the stage with the crude images of lower class expression as a modern Diogenes , Christopher Walken, searches for the hand he lost forty-seven years ago. He is a perfect embodiment of McDonagh's irony, an actor with great subtlety in the nuances of his madness, which grows and amplifies into something beyond absurdity.
Zoe Kazan and Anthony Mackie are lively and convincing as his con artist victims, and Sam Rockwell is vivid as an idiot hotel clerk. He holds his own in the scenes with Walken, who is a flaming torch of an actor even when sitting in silence.
Scott Pask's marvelous set design of a decayed sleazy hotel room, stained ceiling and all, even carries over into the torn, disgusting front curtain, and his costumes take a tiny step beyond the ordinary. John Crowley has directed with extraordinary timing that takes even the most serious into a comedic absurdity. This play needs to be named a new genre: Absurdist Dramedy. And Walken does something that American actors don't do (the only one I saw do it was Luther Adler in Fiddler on the Roof a long time ago) - he played his most dramatic scene with his full back to the audience, addressing Rockwell over his shoulder with his face in profile. Bravo!
If you saw McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, you'll find cat irony in this spellbinding piece of theater.
