English playwright Martin McDonagh is known for addressing large-scale themes with black comedy and rough-hewn insight, and GableStage has scored big in the past few years with its award-winning productions of recent McDonagh plays “The Pillowman” and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” Now, the Coral Gables playhouse is opening its 13th season with McDonagh’s fresh-off-Broadway “A Behanding in Spokane,” a dark-as-death comedy just in time for Halloween.
This time, in terms of both the play and the production, it’s unlikely GableStage will accrue the same showers of
Carbonell awards and critical genuflection heaped on previous McDonagh works. Which isn’t to say that “A Behanding” is a poor play; it’s a fun and diverting experience. The problem is, it’s nothing more than that.
Dennis Creaghan, in the cast’s best performance, plays Carmichael, a racist, gun-toting, one-handed psychopath searching for the past 47 years for the left hand that was apparently detached on a railroad track by a band of hillbillies (don’t expect anything to make much sense, which can be part of the fun in McDonagh’s world). His quest has led him to a hotel room, where he is to pay $500 to a young interracial couple (Charles Marckenson and Jackie Rivera) who claim to have his hand. When they instead provide Carmichael an aboriginal hand they stole from a museum, their lives are on the line, and their only salvation lies in the shiftless, eccentric hotel receptionist (the almost always amusing Erik Fabregat).
At it best, “A Behanding in Spokane” channels the zippy, absurdist craft of ’40s slapstick comedy, albeit with bucketloads of profanity and ghastly visuals (I don’t recall any of those great Cary Grant comedies featuring a suitcase full of severed hands). A subplot involving Carmichael’s unseen mother nearly dying while trying to free a balloon from her tree is particularly inspired. But the exceptionalism that has catapulted recent GableStage productions to astounding success (“Blasted,” “Fifty Words”) is absent here. The set is serviceable, the lighting adequate and the performances sincere but not terribly distinguished. The material has moments of comic genius but has an equal number of stagnating ones, which is never a good thing in an 80-minute production. You’ll leave the play satisfied, but in that unfulfilled, Chinese-food kind of way.
“A Behanding in Spokane” is at GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Tickets are $37.50 to $42.50. Call 305/445-1119.
