Saturday morning

I saw The Druid and Atlantic Theater Company's production of Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan last night at Zellerbach Playhouse with my dear friend Glynda. Oh my goodness. A joyous and relentless and heartrending theatrical masterpiece!

Billy Claven

performed by Ruaidhri Conroy

Here is an excerpt from Ben Brantley's New York Times review that captures a bit about this mighty play's portrayal of a stark world of cruelty and endurance and momentary [seemingly unimagined] kindnesses:

[This is a play] about the excitement-starved inhabitants of Inishmaan. Notable among them is Cripple Billy, an overgrown orphan whose chief hobby has hitherto been staring at cows.

His body a study in conflicting angles, as if contorted by unseen winds, Cripple Billy moves athwart through a world where most people are either ramrod vertical or flat on their backs. The other villagers on the island off western Ireland where Billy lives are fond of pointing out how his twisted form sets him apart from them, and his name is seldom pronounced without the distancing epithet of ''Cripple.'

But as played by a 19-year-old from Dublin named Ruaidhri Conroy, the title character of Martin McDonagh's ''The Cripple of Inishmaan,'' which opened last night at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, comes to seem less like the outcast of the island than its very essence. There's a resonant emotional poetry in Billy's misshapen body: it registers in the struggle that seems to accompany every step he takes, in the yearning forward slope of his shoulders. It is the form of frustration made flesh, and of longings that can never be assuaged. Little wonder that his fellow townspeople, themselves shaped by discontent and a nagging sense of social inferiority to the world at large, keep insisting on the boy's otherness.

But character is not a fixed entity in Inishmaan. “Cripple” is driven by the inconsistencies of human behavior, which echo this equally sad and funny play’s whiplash reversals of mood and fortune. The cast members admirably accept and convey their characters’ paradoxical nature without making a big deal of it. This is essential. For while you would assume that everyone in Inishmaan would know everyone else’s business inside and out, people can still surprise one another. For lack of much better to do, they hoard secrets; they misrepresent themselves; and oh, how they love to lie.

Or should we say tell stories?

Ah, but that is it. Telling lies. Telling stories about themselves and others. And keeping secrets. And for whose good? And being cruel and hurtful and indifferent and hurt and damaged by it all. And then, without notice, an unselfish gift of gentleness.