| Home > Cripple of Inishmaan
> Press
Release >
Playbill
> Show
Photos >
Reviews Click on logo for reviews and articles below
 ★★★★Redtwist shocks and charms with equal ferocity Review by Katy Walsh The thing about the Irish is we enjoy a good story. The bigger the yarn, the bigger the appeal. We amuse ourselves and each other with vivid tales of things that actually happened, could have happened or we wanted to happen. And we find stories are best told with a pint of humor and a shot of mischief. Redtwist Theatre presents The Cripple of Inishmaan. Billy has a deformed hand and foot. In his small Irish hometown, he is called ‘Crippled Billy.’ It seems cruel but it’s not suppose to be. The village embraces a blunt sensibility. They call it like it is. Billy’s aunts discuss his romantic quandary. They know he has no prospects because he’s crippled, ugly and stares at cows. And it’s not just his aunts describing his bleak future. Everyone talks about it… behind his back and to his face. They tell stories about Billy’s questionable health and dead parents. When an American filmmaker arrives at a neighboring island, Billy decides to change his story completely. The Cripple of Inishmaan shocks and charms with equal ferocity. Playwright Martin McDonagh imagines a day-in-the-life for the inhabitants of an Irish island in 1934. McDonagh creates a whole village of quirky characters drawn together in isolation and solidarity. Everyone knows everyone’s business. They gossip. They mock. They ridicule. They are family by geographical constraints. They aren’t ever 'on their best behavior for company’ because there are never any visitors. McDonagh lets his town be completely itself. The dialogue is sharp in wit and insults. Under the expert direction of Kimberly Senior, the talented cast become the eccentric villagers. There is no formality or speech laced in political correctness. The conversation is just the natural, unguarded routine of the town inhabitants. It’s their cruel and usual standard that makes the dark comedy hilarious. Aided by dialect coach Eva Breneman, the ensemble speaks fluent blarney. In the lead, Josh Salt (Billy) captivates trying to change convention. A deformed Salt transfixes with a poignant transformation from persecuted to oppressor to survivor to victim. Even throughout his moments of vulnerable despair, Salt endears with a beautiful underlying hopefulness. Another standout is the vicious performance of Baize Buzan (Helen). A bright-smiling Buzan goes from cheeky to bitchy with disconcerting ease. The rebel-rousing Buzan continues to heighten the comedic absurdity. In a supporting role, Kathleen Ruhl (Mammy) hysterically defies her son’s plans. Ruhl is one tough, drinking matriarch that won’t go down without a fight. And that’s the crux of all the characters. They may be a bunch of eejits, but they are all resilient. Last year, I saw The Cripple of Inishmaan at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. I thoroughly enjoyed McDonagh’s play performed by Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company. But I have to say, I loved this Redtwist version more! I couldn’t always understand the Druid cast’s native tongue. So, I lost some of the plot points. McDonagh has multiple twists in this play. Through Redtwist’s masterful storytelling, I heard, understood and loved every word. For me, The Cripple of Inishmaan is best told by locals pretending to be other locals. Back to top  Highly Recommended reviewed by Tom Williams, chicagocritic.com Wicked humor and savage truths mark dark Irish comedy The folks at Redtwist Theatre continue to mount fine shows featuring terrific sets (here by Jack Magaw), expert Irish brogues (dialect coaching by Eva Breneman) and tight staging by Kimberly Senior with an outstanding cast. We are taken back to one of the Aran Islands off the Irish coast at Inishmaan in 1934 as an American film crew shoots “Man of Aran” around Inishmaan. Kate (Jan Ellen Graves) and Eileen (Debra Rodkin) run a little store on the island. Johnnypateenmike (Brian Parry) is the village gossip who barters “news” for eggs. His daily visits relieve the boredom of rural Irish life. When Johnnypateenmike tells about the arrival of the American movie makers, Helen (Baize Buzan) and her brother Bartley (Patrick C. Whalen) are determined to get Babbybobby (Chris Rickett) to row them ashore to Inishmaan so they can audition for the Yanks. Cripple Billy (Josh Salt) is also determined to leave the island and search for a new adventure as a possible film star. He congers up a plot to motivate Babbybobby to allow him aboard the boat to Inishmaan. Billy is tired of all the verbal abuse and ridicule from the villagers concerning his deformed hand and crippled leg. This often darkly funny story is filled with vicious drama, extreme truths with doses of poignant humanity and violent reactions. We see the realistic side of the ignorant rural Irish. McDonagh’s plays are devoid of the idealistic rustic sentimentality often associated with Irish drama. The Cripple of Inishmaan contains several surprising turns among twists of fate. The work contains mythic Irish fatalism as it uses lyrical language to convey cruel yet heartwarming events. McDonagh blends humor with brutality to tell his honest slice-of-life Irish stories. The characters here are colorful, eccentric and so Irish. From Mammy (Kathleen Ruhl) Johnnypateenmike’s 90 year old drunken mother – to Kate who talks to a stone -to cruel Helen who enjoys breaking eggs over her brother’s head -to Billy who has to endure the savage jokes and nasty name calling–all are struggling to escape the boredom of rural life. Josh Salt’s empathetic Cripple Billy and Brian Parry’s hilarious turn as the town gossip are the featured performances among the fine ensemble work contained here. It is a pleasure to see a major work being so well staged and performed as The Cripple of Inishmaan is at Redtwist Theatre. They continue to mount outstanding works at their intimate Rogers Park theatre. No wonder that their last twelve shows have been Jeff Recommended. Back to top  Recommended reviewed by Zac Thompson Martin McDonagh deftly balances sentiment and cruelty in this Irish-gothic folktale about an orphan who longs to escape the Aran Islands village where his gossipy, hardhearted neighbors know him as Cripple Billy. Filled with unexpected twists and characters who can't stop telling and revising stories, the play at once satirizes and celebrates the grand Irish tradition of making shit up. It would've been easy for director Kimberly Senior to go the quaint-and-colorful route. But she and her cast avoid turning the townsfolk into merry blarney peddlers, thus preserving the script's dry humor and unpredictability. Jack Magaw's stone-cottage set strikes just the right note, managing to look stark and cozy at the same time. Back to top  RECOMMENDEDreviewed by Rob Underwood “Ireland isn’t idyllic, and the Aran Islands aren’t meant to be a tourist trap… Inishmaan isn’t supposed to be an escape but a prison–something nasty, brutal and short.” So says the dramaturg’s note on the playbill of Redtwist Theatre’s newest production. The near-claustrophobic theater space, with stark grey stone for the walls and floor and a spartan collection of set pieces, makes for an immediate confrontation with Inishmaan’s nastiness. It is once the play begins, however, that we see the boundaries and limits between brutality and humor toyed with and eventually spit on. Though the words are famed playwright Martin McDonagh’s, Kimberly Senior’s direction and the excellent ensemble skillfully extract the provincial humor that makes these brutish and rough figures fully human. The cast as a whole is excellent, but Josh Salt’s performance as the eponymous cripple Billy deserves specific mention. On top of his physical malady, we quickly learn that Billy was orphaned shortly after his birth; the rumors entrenched in Inishmaan allude to suicide and bags full of rocks thrown overboard. There’s a good deal more wrong with Billy, but the final sequences of the play (in addition to establishing this as one of recent history’s great tragicomedies) undoubtedly satisfy best when the audience knows as little as possible. Salt succeeds in making us believe that despite all he’s suffered, he still has hopes for and believes he can attain a better life. Perhaps it is due to Salt’s youth (he’s still only in his third year at Columbia College) that he makes it seem that Inishmaan depends on Billy not just for a hearty laugh, but for a certain spiritual presence that reveals itself over the course of the play. Back to top  ★★★ Reviewed by Dan JakesMartin McDonagh’s portrait of rural Irish life in the 1930s is uncharacteristically hopeful Wander into Redtwist without taking a close look at the playbill, and you might mistake carnage-by-the-pound writer Martin McDonagh’s uncharacteristically tender depiction of 1934 Ireland for something by Brian Friel. Sure, there are a few blood packs, offed animals and relentless bullies—it’s not exactly Dancing at Lughnasa—but McDonagh explores something different here, a sense of wanderlust and community. The Irish playwright also gives his titular “cripple” (Josh Salt, awfully handsome for a character we’re assured can never find a wife) something you don’t often see in McDonagh’s more acerbic works: hope. Qualified hope, at least. Self-ordained town meddler Johnnypateenmike (the reliable Brian Parry), whose gossip is typically limited to banal observations and petty feuds, spreads the word that American filmmakers are casting Irish locals for Robert Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran. Against the doubts of his surrogate aunts (Debra Rodkin and Jan Ellen Graves), vicious crush (Baize Buzan) and his own deteriorating health, “cripple Billy” voyages to Inishmore in hopes of escaping his village’s mundanity and pursuing an unlikely life in the U.S. McDonagh’s script paints a surprisingly empathetic portrait of a deeply insecure and flawed village, and director Kimberly Senior maintains a sense of urgency and comedy even when the story lacks immediate conflict. Back to top  Highly Recommended ★★★★★reviewed by Al Bresloff Storefront theaters of Chicago are amazing! In these little “black box” theaters, Chicago audiences get to witness some of the best productions that one can see. What is also amazing is that some of the productions that they transfer from large ,big budget venues, are more realistic in the intimate setting of the “black box”. Such is the latest production of redtwist theatre, that cozy little theater located on Bryn Mawr that pledges to do “white hot drama, in a tiny black box, with a little red twist” and their sterling production of Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan”. This production, directed by Kimberly Senior (to perfection, I might add) tells the story of a small town and “cripple Billy” (a powerful performance by newcomer,Josh Salt- redtwist keeps finding solid talent!), a physically challenged young man, who is the target of the town’s jokes. He has been raised by his “aunts”Kate (the always reliable Jan Ellen Graves) and Eileen (deftly handled by Debra Rodkin) who are not really blood relatives. As McDonagh weaves his dramatic tale about this young man and his circumstances, we learn a great deal about his deceased parents, who , as the story goes, drowned on a boat as they fled for America without him. There is some mystery to the actual events of this event that come out slowly, but make sense when we are made aware of the actual fatal day. When it is part of the local news ( a job that is handled by Johnnypateenmike (Brian Parry continues to amaze me with his ability to play almost any type of character) that an American film company is going to be in the twon of Inishmaan in search of talent for a movie they are about to shoot, the locals decide to see if they can get in the film. Billy convinces the local boat owner, Babbybobby (a strong performance by Chris Rickett) to take him with. He earns the right to go to America, as they feel a cripple in the role will be something different. This rise to fame make sthe townspeople show him some new respect. He is gone for some time and becomes very ill while in America, the locals have no idea if he is alive or dead as there has been no contact. When he does come back, without having taken the role, it matters not to him as he now feels differently about himself and in fact, respects himself for the first time in his life. But we, the audience ,now learn some truths about the events of the past and some of the townspeople as we watch the changed Billy emerge. I do not want to give away the ending of this heartwarming story, but we see the others in the town for who they really are and the love and the caring of the “aunts” that have raised Billy to adulthood. The other characters in this strong production are Mammy (the hysterical Kathleen Ruhl- great comic timing) as Johnnypateenmike’s mother, Chuck Spencer as Doctor McSharry, Patrick C. Whalen as Bartley and Baize Buzan (an incredible performance) as his sister Helen, the town bully. This is a two plus hours of intimate storytelling, and Senior captures every word of McDonagh’s script with her strong cast. The set by Jack Magaw (who also did the lighting) is incredible when you think of the size of the theater.He has even brought a boat on stage! Christopher Kriz handles the sound and original music which is both hauntingly beautiful and very Irish. This is the second time I have seen this play, the first being at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at Navy Pier, which was a large scale, big budget production, a little over a year ago. This one, in this little “black box” topped that one and should be on your "to see" list. Back to top  Highly Recommendedreviewed by Catey Sullivan Chicago Theatre Review Examiner In the playwright Martin McDonagh's Ireland, you’ll find no charming leprechauns or whimsical queries about how things are in Glocca Morra. The Emerald Isle of McDonagh’s dramatic world is a place of violence, cruelty, dead ends and the sort of pitch-black humor that can only result from years of frustration and hardship. So it is in The Cripple of Inishmaan, set in the barren, rocky landscape of the Aran Islands and centering on the titular lad’s attempts to break free of a harshly limiting world. Directed by Kimberly Senior for A Redtwist Theatre, The Cripple of Inishmaan is steeped in comingled hope, despair and rage. It is also darkly funny in its depiction of an isolated rural village upended by the arrival of Hollywood movie makers who ignite pipe dreams in islanders hoping to be discovered and whisked off to America for a life of movie stardom. Set in the 1930s, The Cripple of Inishmaan is very much about the Irish gift of gab and storytelling. But the stories here – how Cripple Billy’s parents died, the true state of Cripple Billy’s health, the outcome of his unlikely screen test – these and other matters twine truth with tall tales, with the former constantly knocking the audience off-guard as the latter is revealed to be less than reliable information. Among McDonagh’s considerable gifts is his ability to keep surprising the audience as he reveals first one side and then another within the nexus of contradictions that make up human nature. Just as you feel you’ve seen the hard truth, McDonagh reveals yet another angle of unvarnished reality, overturning facts like stones. Chief among the storytellers in lonesome Aran [Inishmaan] is JohnnypateenMike (Brian Parry), the village gossip. Going from house to house and demanding payment in eggs and cuts of meat in exchange for scraps of news, Johnnypateen seems throughout to be a meddling, manipulative and wholly smarmy version of a backwater Hollywood gossipmonger as he gleefully relates "news" of sheep born without ears, petty feuds and – most momentously – the arrival of the Hollywood film crew on the mainland in nearby Inishmore. It’s that last news that Cripple Billy (Josh Salt) seizes on as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape a place where everyone calls him “Cripple Billy” and has relegated him to a life of lonesome solitude since no woman would ever have a man as misshapen and odd as he. As for that oddness, Cripple Billy isn’t only set apart by his orphan status and twisted limbs. He also loves to read, an activity viewed as downright freakish by the village folk. It’s through a bit of manipulation of his own that Cripple Billy finagles a ride to Inishmore for the filming, setting the daft but loving aunts who raised him into an obsessive state of worry that leaves one talking to stones and the other gorging secretly on imported penny candies. While The Cripple of Inishmaan doesn’t lack for McDonagh’s signature elements of bloodshed and hostile hopelessness, it’s also marked by a sweetness and an undeniable sense of close-knit community. Inishmaan may be defined in large part by its brutal landscape and the casual cruelty of its residents, but it is also a place of undeniable camaraderie. Even when they're clubbing each other with sticks and eggs, the people of Inishmaan are bound together both by the hardscrabble living the island demands and its isolated landscape. The happiness is far beneath the surface most of the time, but director Senior skillfully brings it to the surface without compromising the harsh daily brutalities of life in a place that’s little more than a rocky outcropping. Redtwist's cast is uniformly strong. As Cripple Billy, Salt displays a winning mix of strength and a vulnerability. Cripple Billy has both an intensely yearning wanderlust in his desire to break free of Inishmaan and an unbreakable connection to the only place he’s ever called home. Salt captures those contradictory impulses ably. As for Cripple Billy’s aunties Kate and Eileen, Jan Ellen Graves and Debra Rodkin manage to capture the doting and dottiness of a pair that could easily slip into blathering Irish stereotype. That slippage doesn’t happen here, and it’s a testament to both Senior’s astute direction and Graves’ and Rodkin’s ability to bring complexity to potentially one-dimensional roles. Other standouts include Chris Rickett as the good-hearted (to a point) boatman Babbybobby and Kathleen Ruhl who gives the role of Johnnypateen’s perpetually drunken Mammy with an acid-etched edge that’s memorable in all the right ways. As the son who is trying to kill his overbearing mother with drink, Brian Parry makes JohnnypateenMike as obnoxious as insufferable and cluelessly self-centered as a spoiled child, making a final scene revelation about Johnnypateen all the more moving. Part of McDonagh’s considerable gift lies in his ability to defy expectations. Just when you think you know where The Cripple of Inishmaan is going and who its characters truly are, the author shifts the narrative rug beneath your feet and reveals another, unexpected perspective. It’s those shifts that propel the production toward its mildly bloody but intensely ominous final moments. It speaks to the power of the cast that every last corkscrewing revelation seems as natural as the bleak, beautiful landscape of Inishmaan. Back to top  Unlikely warmth in 'Inishmaan' ★★★ By Kerry Reid, Special to the Tribune Martin McDonagh's sardonic portraits of rural Irish village life take the happy-go-lucky and comradely eccentrics made popular in films such as "Waking Ned Devine" and put them through an acid wash, revealing all the pettiness and cruelty that is possible when people live in reduced — and far too close — circumstances. But occasionally, McDonagh allows his characters flashes of fellow feeling. Kimberly Senior's intimate staging of "The Cripple of Inishmaan" for Redtwist Theatre brings those strands of stunted compassion to the foreground in a way that was lacking from the Druid Theatre's magisterial production at Chicago Shakespeare last year. It's 1934, and the tiny isle of Inishmaan is atizzy with news that Hollywood has come calling: filmmaker Robert Flaherty (who directed the documentary "Nanook of the North") has arrived to shoot "Man of Aran," a part-fiction, part-fact look at the hardscrabble lives on the rocky shores and dangerous seas of the Aran Islands. For sensitive handicapped orphan Billy Claven (Josh Salt), known colloquially as "Cripple Billy," the film provides an escape hatch from the gibes of the locals and the boredom of a world where watching cows is the highlight of his day. But this being McDonagh's Ireland, Billy's winning lottery ticket to La-La Land doesn't play out as he imagines. The consequences aren't nearly as grim here as in "The Pillowman," McDonagh's dark look at a tortured writer, which got a transcendent production at Redtwist under Senior's hand a couple of years ago. Her cast, despite some uneven dialects, generally finds some breathing room between the mordant quips to quietly capture the ceaseless drudgery and blighted hopes of the characters. Jack Magaw's stone-cottage set and sickish lighting suggest the cheerless confines of these lives. Salt's Billy reveals flashes of calculation. Despite his broken body, he's not entirely a figure of pathos. As Eileen and Kate, the two women who have fostered him since infancy, Debra Rodkin and Jan Ellen Graves provide well-crafted takes on two cliches of Irish womanhood: the wisecracking earth mother and the moony mystic. Brian Parry's tiresome gossip, Johnnypateenmike, blends gassy self-importance with the naked need for communal affirmation, and Kathleen Ruhl nearly steals the show as "Mammy." "You shouldn't laugh at other people's misfortunes," Billy admonishes one of his peers. "Why?" is the bewildered response. Senior's take on McDonagh's fractious and loquacious yokels provides a decent amount of laughs, but it's the glancing moments of offhanded kindness that breathe some warmth into this unsentimental tale of dashed dreams and duplicity. Back to top  Redtwist puts an intimate spin on dark humor of McDonagh’s rough and quirky ‘Inishmaan’ ★★★★ By Nancy Malitz The last time Martin McDonagh’s brutally funny play “The Cripple of Inishmaan” came to Chicago, it was in March 2011 at the spacious main stage of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Druid, a Galway-based theater company that tours widely, had designed its traveling production for proscenium theaters, and so the actors kept their physical distance from the audience while creating wickedly exaggerated characters. The story, set in the ’30s, concerns a sparsely populated island off Galway Bay whose eccentric citizens become transfixed by the stunning news that Hollywood big shots have arrived on the next island over, to recruit locals for the shooting of a whaling adventure “filim.” Now it’s Redtwist Theatre’s turn, in their claustrophobic little space in the Bryn Mawr Historic District, which turns out to be equally fine for the purpose, but in a different way. This time we’re right inside the rustic walls of the little Inishmaan store that’s inhabited by the stubborn aunties of Cripple Billy. Director Kimberly Senior brings us face to face with these nosy pessimists and all the other colorful characters in this tight-knit and ready-fisted community. They seem rugged and plenty quirky, but entirely human. It’s as if we’re getting a chance to know them a few decades before the story-tellers spun them larger into legend. Given McDonagh’s savage humor, his delight in shock and his tolerance for pouring buckets of blood over intimate moments — his film “In Bruges” is a case in point — there can be little doubt he intended the denizens of Inishmaan to be every bit as outlandish as Druid made them. Yet even McDonagh would find himself enchanted by the gentler humor and tragic grace of the story as it plays out in this winning Chicago production. Cripple Billy, the play’s title character, was for Druid a boy with withered extremities and pathetically twisted looks so alarming his aunties feared he’d never marry. At Redtwist, Billy is played by the strapping Josh Salt, whose flaws seem fairly minor given the over-protective worries of his aunties (portrayed with dotty charm by Debra Rodkin and Jan Ellen Graves). Slippy Helen in Druid’s production is a tall town bully who you readily believe has been terrorizing people ever since since she was accosted by a priest at the age of 6. At Redtwist, Helen’s a spunky, petite thing (the delightful Baize Buzan) whom you’re actually rooting for as she breaks raw eggs over people’s noggins. Her younger brother, Bartley — who in Druid’s production is so singly-obsessed with candies as to seem mentally challenged — is at Redtwist a multi-dimensional pal to both Billy and Helen. (Bartley’s played with heart by Patrick C. Whalen.) A subplot that takes charming flight here is the saga of Johnnypateenmike, the island newscaster and gossipmonger (not necessarily in that order) and the 90-year-old Mammy he’s been plying with booze for decades in hopes of hastening her early demise. So close are we to Kathleen Ruhl as the cheerfully cooperative alcoholic that we can see her ruddy face and lip-smacking eagerness as she prepares to please her son by draining another half bottle of the stiff stuff before noon. The riotous interplay between Brian Parry as the enabling son and Chuck Spencer as the horrified doctor, who’s been called to Mammy’s bedside, is a fine run of drinking jokes in the best Irish tradition. So it’s in this intimate anti-Mayberry that we learn about butchered cats and strangled geese and get some hints about the truth surrounding the death of Billy’s parents while he was yet an infant. The sea is deadly, life is hard and tenderness comes to Inishmaan rarely, as a fragile sprout that pokes through windblown turf. Billy’s oppression is real, stuck as he is in a community that pushes people into lifelong pigeon-holes before they’re out of childhood. His need to leave is underscored in many ways. Two excellent scenes in the play are confrontations between Josh Salt’s Billy and the boatsman Babbybobby, brilliantly played by Chris Rickett as a struggling widower, taciturn without, boiling within. In their first encounter, Billy is on a mission to convince Babbybobby — however he can — to ferry him to the island where the Hollywood crew is said to be hiring. The second time, Billy will have some serious explaining to do. As Billy’s “filim” adventure takes its perilous twists and turns, life goes on in Inishmaan. Senior’s sure directorial hand is apparent in her attention to small town behavior, as time affords endless examination and re-examination and little of any import escapes shared scrutiny. The leisurely pace belies smart, swift scene changes in minimal space made possible by the room-transforming traps, flaps, drop-downs and chiaroscuro effects of set and lighting designer Jack Magaw. So believable is the picture created of a rustic fixation on all events big and small, that it comes as a distinct pleasure to learn certain secrets on this particular island have been well kept after all. Back to top  Skokie actors explore life on Irish islet Article by Myrna Petlicki The residents of an isolated Irish island are hungry for news and actor Brian Parry, as Johnnypateenmike, is glad to provide it for a price in Redtwist Theatre’s production of “The Cripple of Inishmaan” by Martin McDonagh. The show runs through June 24 in Chicago. “Johnny considers himself a journalist,” Skokie resident Parry said. “He’s one of a small community where everybody has to find their function in order to scrape out a way to survive on this little island. The only function he seems to have cultivated is the ability to go snooping out bits of information that he turns into news reports that he takes from locale to locale.” One of his stops is the general store owned by two sisters, Kate and Eileen, who give him food or drink for his updates. Skokie resident Jan Graves, who is Redtwist’s managing director, plays Kate. “She’s got a kind of love-hate relationship with everybody she knows,” Graves said of Kate. “There’s a tedium to life there which necessitates the characters finding ways to liven things up. That could be by complaining or magnifying the situation by using humor and throwing jabs at one another.” In addition to being the proprietor of the local store, Kate is an adoptive aunt to Cripple Billy, an orphaned, physically challenged young man. “Cripple Billy is a burden on her but she loves him dearly,” Graves said. Film frenzy Kate’s charge becomes swept up in the excitement when the townspeople learn that a Hollywood crew is in the area to film a movie. Of course, everyone learns about the filming from Johnnypateenmike. “This is perhaps the biggest truly genuine piece of news he’s ever come across,” Parry said. “He’s definitely going to make it pay off by getting the news out to everybody and getting paid for sharing that information. He’s bringing a tremendous excitement and opportunity, he feels, to a group of people who don’t have much to be excited about.” Parry understands their situation because, in preparation for the role, he visited one of the larger of the Aran Islands over the summer, which include the real Inishmaan. He described these islands as “big rocks sitting in the Atlantic off the coast of Galway. Inishmaan is about three miles across.” Parry and his wife toured Inishmore, the island where the filming of “Man of Aran,” the event referred to in the play, actually took place. “We rode around on a bike and we experienced the range of weather conditions that being stuck out there in the middle of the sea makes you prone to,” Parry said. The play is set in 1934, when conditions were particularly bad because there was no electricity or running water on the islands at that time. Immersion As always, Redtwist has created a set that will immerse the audience in the world of the play. “The audience is on both sides within the stone cottage that most of the action takes place in,” Graves said. “So, they’re close to the actors. A boat actually comes into the setting. There’s a shop door with a bell on it that announces everyone’s arrival. They really will feel part of the stone and dirt environment that’s typical of the Island of Inishmaan.” Parry has been in a number of productions at Redtwist including “Shining City,” for which he received a Jeff Award as Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He said he particularly likes Redtwist’s play selection. Graves said that the company chose “The Cripple of Inishmaan” because, “We wanted to do another edgy play,” particularly for director Kimberly Senior, who staged the company’s productions of “Bug” (Jeff recommended) and “The Pillowman” (Jeff Award). Back to top  PRESS RELEASEMay 17, 2012 Redtwist Theatre recently received a Jeff Recommendation for its current production of The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, which runs through June 24. It marks the 12th show in a row to be recommended by the Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee for outstanding work. In addition, Redtwist has received 9 Jeff nominations including a best production nomination for Opus, which will also be remounted at Theater on the Lake during the week of July 4, 2012. Beginning with the 2009-2010 season opener, Lettice and Lovage, all our regular season, Jeff-eligible shows have been Jeff recommended. The list, beginning with the current production, is as follows: NEXT JEFF SEASON May-June 2012: The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, directed by Kimberly Senior CURRENT JEFF SEASON Feb-Mar 2012: The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later by Moises Kaufman/Tectonic Theater Project, directed by Greg Kolack Dec 2011-Jan 2012: Opus by Michael Hollinger, directed by Jason W. Gerace. 5 Jeff nominations: Production; Ensemble; Director-Jason W. Gerace; Sound Design-Chris Kris; Artistic Specialization-Zhanna Bullock, Music Coach Sept-Oct 2011: Elling by Simon Bent, directed by Steve Scott. 1 Jeff Nomination: Principal Actor-Peter Oyloe July-Aug 2011: That Face by Polly Stenham, directed by Michael Colucci. May-July 2011: Bug by Tracy Letts directed and designed by Kimberly Senior and Jack Magaw. 3 Jeff Nominations: Principal Actress-Jacqueline Grandt; Scenic Design-Jack Magaw & Kimberly Senior; Sound Design-Christopher Kriz PREVIOUS JEFF SEASONS Mar-May 2011: Man from Nebraska by Tracy Letts, directed by Andrew Jessop. Nominated for Best Production, Principal Actor-Chuck Spencer. Won for both Best Production and Actor, Chuck Spencer. Jan-Feb 2011: Shining City by Conor McPherson, directed by Joanie Schultz. Nominated for Supporting Actor-Brian Parry who won the award. Dec 2010-Jan 2011: Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan, directed by Keira Fromm. Nominated for Best Production, Director-Keira Fromm, Principal Actor-Andrew Jessop. Sept-Oct 2010: A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee, directed by Steve Scott. Nominated for Best Production. Nov 2009-May 2010: The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, directed by Kimberly Senior. Nominations were for Best Production, Director--Kimberly Senior, Principal Actor--Andrew Jessop, Supporting Actor--Peter Oyloe. Peter Oyloe won the award. Oct-Nov 2009: Lettice and Lovage by Peter Shaffer, directed by Steve Scott. Millicent Hurley was nominated for Principal Actress. Back to top |