Broadway Blog - A BEHANDING IN SPOKANE Review Roundup

The title is just the starting point; take a man searching for his missing hand (Christopher Walken), two con artists out to make a few hundred bucks (Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan), and an overly curious hotel clerk (Sam Rockwell), and the rest is up for grabs. A Behanding in Spokane is Academy Award-winner Martin McDonagh's hilariously black comedy, a world premiere which marks McDonagh's first American-set play.

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: "Sometimes, in one of theater's more undervalued romantic story lines, an actor meets a set and - flash! - chemistry happens. The opening image of Christopher Walken in Martin McDonagh's "Behanding in Spokane" is such a perfect, demented marriage of character and environment that you can't help grinning like a fool."

Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press: "Far more interesting is the hotel's receptionist (Sam Rockwell), a peculiar man whose strangeness matches Carmichael's. Rockwell effectively channels this man, a fellow who eventually forms a bond with the one-handed guest. The actor gets his own showy monologue in the middle of this short play, which barely runs 90 minutes. But it's quirky for quirk's sake, entertaining but not really helpful in expanding the plot. Still, there is Walken to take up the slack when the weirdness threatens to spin out of control. His performance will haunt you even if the play does not."

Elysa Gardner, USA Today: "As is, this Spokane offers more laughs than insights. While hardly McDonagh's most fully realized effort, it leaves us wondering where his own singular imagination will take him next."

David Sheward, Backstage: "There's not much to Martin McDonagh's "A Behanding in Spokane." While this 90-minute exercise in hilarious terror shares the brutality and pitch-black humor of the Irish playwright's previous works, it doesn't have anything to say about the country of its setting (as his Gaelic-centric plays such as "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" do) or the nature of storytelling (the theme of "The Pillowman")."

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: "Bottom Line: A brilliant cast elevates this profane shaggy-dog comedy to wildly entertaining proportions."

Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal: "When blood is shed in a Martin McDonagh play, the audience always laughs-and usually gasps. Mr. McDonagh is partial to comic violence, and in "A Behanding in Spokane" he lets it rip. I mustn't be too specific, this being a play full of grisly surprises, but there's one thing about which I can be absolutely precise: "A Behanding in Spokane" is the funniest new play to open in New York since I started writing this column."

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune: "The latest Broadway play from Martin McDonagh lands somewhere between "Pulp Fiction" and an extended star-driven sketch from "Saturday Night Live." We already knew that McDonagh ("The Beauty Queen of Leenane," "Pillowman") writes with remarkable facility in the self-aware, neo-gothic, Tarantino-esque style. But the formative devil has become more formatively devilish. "A Behanding in Spokane" reveals a more comic and happily anarchic side of this irreverent Irish writer, who consumed American noir as a youth in far greater quantity than Kerrygold butter. "

More Reviews to Come in the AM!