A Behanding In Spokane Broadway Reviews

Even if, like me, you are no great fan of the Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, you will find “A Behanding in Spokane,” in which Christopher Walken makes a triumphant return to the Broadway stage, insane yet also fiendishly funny. McDonagh is a specialist in unleashed violence, in which he shamelessly revels. Here the violence is comical, and we are kept guessing throughout a farce that is as irresistible as it is improbable.

One very sick yet awfully funny play, 'A Behanding in Spokane' stars Christopher Walken as a scary guy dead set on finding the forelimb he lost as a boy. Anyone squeamish or especially politically correct should skip the new Broadway play that premiered on Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. Racial slurs and moldering body parts fly all over the place. Otherwise snare an adults-only ticket. Showcased at his spookiest best as a one-handed weirdo, Walken is hilarious and the sharply-staged comedy-thriller he haunts packs 90 minutes of nasty entertainment.

You're welcome to interpret 'A Behanding in Spokane' as a fable about two lost souls who have more in common than they realize—Mervyn, the hotel clerk, is fully as interesting a character as the mysterious Mr. Carmichael—or you can relax and revel in the virtuosity with which Mr. McDonagh stuffs wildly funny words into the mouths of his cast. Either way, you'll spend an hour and a half laughing nonstop.

Onscreen, Christopher Walken's oft-imitated shtick has veered into self-parody in recent years. But seeing it live is a whole other matter: On the evidence of his brilliant performance in Martin McDonagh's new play, 'A Behanding in Spokane,' the actor should have returned to the stage a long time ago. Fueling the evening with his endlessly entertaining physical mannerisms, offbeat comic timing and hilarious vocal inflections, Walken lifts this slight shaggy-dog story into the comic stratosphere. Add superb support by a blue-chip cast, including Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan, and you have one of the most entertaining if bizarre offerings on Broadway.

There is something delightfully, wickedly off about all four characters in Behanding, including Rockwell's Mervyn. 'I always used to hope they'd have one of those shooting massacres at my high school, didn't you?” he says at one point. 'They'd come in, y'know, as they do, dressed like soldiers, just to be different, and then I'd, y'know, do something brave and save everybody. Well, not everybody, else it wouldn't be a high school massacre, but maybe after they got, say, twelve?' And as McDonagh & Co. build the suspense toward what seems to be an inevitably explosive finale, we're forced to ponder why we too seem to be drawn to stories of extreme violence. How much does our collective curiosity about the extreme and the macabre fuel society's nuttiest members to act out their (and our) most out-there fantasies?

Walken's performance is amazing, the stuff Tony Awards are made of. Using his silky voice and haunting eyes, he's spectacularly spooky and funny as Carmichael, a lone-fisted oddball searching for his hand, which, so he says, was severed by hooligans. As if to add insult to injury, the thugs waved goodbye to him with his own purloined paw. That sickly hilarious image is trademark McDonagh, an Irish writer whose credits include the plays 'The Pillowman' and 'The Lieutenant of Inishmore,' and the film 'In Bruges.' 'Spokane,' like those works, has twists and turns and a sense that something awful is around the next bend. It plays out for 90 minutes in a roach hotel rendered to cracked-plaster perfection by Scott Pask, who also did the shrewd costumes.

A Behanding in Spokane is laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s also a bit disappointing. Unlike many of Mr. McDonagh’s earlier works, equally funny and typically gorier, it doesn’t seem to have any deeper point than the comedy. It’s also the first time he has set a play in the United States, which I think detracts: The skewed worlds he creates make sense on a remote, fog-shrouded Irish island; in a nondescript American city, the unreality bumps up against reality. And he doesn’t quite have an ear for American dialect: His working-class grafters use plenty of “ain’ts,” but they also use a few “mightn’ts.”

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.

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.

This is McDonagh's first play set in America and his second, after The Pillowman, not located in his native Ireland. He takes to certain of our idioms ('a coon's age,' 'y'know,' 'motherfucker'), but A Behanding lacks the lyricism of his earlier works. It also lacks their substance. That no one dies is not the only reason this amusing, harmless piece proves less affecting than any of his previous works. Instead of making the door to this hotel room one of the 'ten thousand several,' McDonagh has merely hung a metaphorical 'Do Not Disturb' sign on it.

If only the play felt more consequential! I really don't have a clear handle on what A Behanding in Spokane is supposed to be about, beyond painting portraits of a couple of grotesquely obsessed losers. The play, just 90 minutes long, still overstays its welcome, and in at least one area—its politically incorrect depiction of Carmichael as an unredeemed racist—it doesn't so much push buttons as simply annoy. McDonagh seems less comfortable with American archetypes and dialect than with those of his native Ireland; the decision to set the play in America seems designed mostly to accommodate his American cast (and Walken uses a weird accent that sometimes sounds likes New Orleans and other times sounds like his trademark Hollywood drawl, so the specific locale is beside the point).

Christopher Walken has an eccentric charisma, his hangdog, sorrowful demeanor spiked with a twisted kind of charm. The mix is a perfect fit for Martin McDonagh's particular brand of macabre comedy. That Walken is the main attraction of the playwright's new 'A Behanding in Spokane' is obvious -- the other night, the audience erupted into guffaws every time the star opened his mouth... But the play is on cruise control, and not even Walken can save it.

But Spokane, which opened Thursday at Broadway's Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, seems more like an homage to the iconically edgy playwrights who have long inspired McDonagh, or a parody of them. Laden with obscenity, menace and wry humor, this latest effort nods to Harold Pinter and David Mamet, though it doesn't approach the brutal brilliance of their work — or McDonagh's own previous outings.

For the first few ecstatic moments of “A Behanding in Spokane,” which opened Thursday night at the Schoenfeld Theater, it looks as if the dangerous promises of Mr. Walken’s dead gaze will be fulfilled many fold. That they are not is no fault of Mr. Walken’s. His use of his signature arsenal of stylistic oddities has seldom been more enthralling. But the disappointment that shadows the face of Mr. Walken’s character — a one-handed man who has been searching for years for his severed appendage — comes to seem like a prophecy of the audience’s. The rest of the erratically enjoyable “Behanding” — directed by John Crowley and featuring Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan — never matches the strange genius of its star.

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'). It just seems as if McDonagh picked a spot on a map of the U.S. that sounded intriguing for the title, then put a psycho in a hotel room with two incredibly stupid crooks and an equally dim-bulb night clerk. Then he stirred in some Tarantino/Coen brothers–style gore, a dash of existential angst, a smattering of pop-culture references (heavy on 'The Night of the Hunter'), and hoped for a box-office hit.

If “Saturday Night Live” allowed foul language, and Christopher Walken happened to be the guest host one week, I could easily imagine the writers brainstorming the idea for a send-up of a Martin McDonagh play. They'd call it 'A Behanding in Spokane' and it would feature McDonagh's signature elements: violence, body parts, and ghoulish humor. Of course 'Behanding...' is actually McDonagh's latest work to open on Broadway. And while I can't exactly say it's a bad play, it's just not a play at all.

While McDonagh's previous stage works reportedly were written in a sustained burst of early-career productivity, 'Spokane' was penned following completion of his 2008 feature debut as writer-director, 'In Bruges.' It feels here as if the playwright is catering to his fans' expectations -- the gruesome flourishes and blithe violence, the lacerating dialogue and savage humor, the maniacal characters and explosive confrontations -- but in sketch form rather than a full-bodied play. All the same, many will be delighted with what he serves up.

In A Behanding in Spokane, Martin McDonagh’s latest and lightest abattoir food fight, Christopher Walken is very much himself—which is to say, he’s reliably Walkenesque, a walking Walken impression far superior to the kind your stupid friends do at parties. Playing a vengeful psycho in search of his severed left hand (did I really need to tell you Walken plays a vengeful psycho?), he remains that familiar symphony of jigs and twitches we’ve come to love, burning holes in the fourth wall with anthracite eyes that seem terrifyingly lidless, until he winks. And wink he does, more than once, at his oft-bewildered co-stars—Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan as two young hustlers who disastrously attempt to sell him another man’s hand, and Sam Rockwell as Mervyn, the distractible sad-sack hotel clerk who admires him—and, by extension, at us. Watching Walken/Carmichael savor his own cigarette smoke, and his own travel-worn oddness, is like walking in on something autoerotic, then staying to watch. Which we can’t help doing, even if we sense a certain flogging futility in the proceedings. Walken is a little too perfectly matched with McDonagh (The Pillowman, The Lieutenant of Inishmore). They’re two tic-ish synthesists for whom quirk can quickly become an end in itself.

Walken is perfectly in synch with McDonagh's disturbed universe, but gives the same kind of ghoulish, monotonic performance that has become his defining trademark. Rockwell makes a lasting impression as a cocky and creepy clerk with nothing to lose or gain. Meanwhile, Mackie and Kazan merely engage in a shouting match and act hysterically. Bottom line: While John Crowley's atmospheric production is well-staged and Walken has chilling stage presence, this slight play feels like a missed opportunity.

While all is not sunshine, lollipops and rainbows in Martin McDonagh's newest gruesome comedy, A Behanding In Spokane, it is, by the playwright's standards, considerably lighter fare. No cats or children are harmed, nobody's shot in the head at point-blank range and there are no pots of urine involved at any time during the playwright's first piece set in America. Yes, there are characters that have gasoline poured on them and are then threatened with a lighter, but in moments like that the real suspense lies in whether or not we're about to see a really cool special effect.

The matchup of Walken, unpredictably creepy American actor, and Martin McDonagh, virtuosically gruesome Irish playwright, has finally occurred. And it's as perfect a frisson as it always was meant to be - except for one problem. The play is really not good. 'A Behanding in Spokane,' the 90-minute McDonagh world premiere that lured Walken back for a rare stage appearance, is so thin, trivial and underdeveloped that the humor depends on two separate scenes of characters throwing severed hands at one another.

What’s to savor here, then? Two words: Christopher Walken. Who cares whether or not Carmichael was written with his eccentric delivery in mind; Walken can retune any text to his dissonant, syncopated key. Innocuous lines become menacing, and psychotic remarks provoke giggles. Carmichael’s true nature or motive is never revealed, but then no one bothered making him a real character; we’re just enjoying a beloved film star who can get laughs from his zombie stare and demented, wistful phrasing.

I don’t know a single self-respecting black actor who wouldn’t feel shame and fury while sitting through Martin McDonagh’s new play, “A Behanding in Spokane” (directed by John Crowley, at the Gerald Schoenfeld). Nor do I know one who would have the luxury of turning the show down, once the inevitable tours and revivals get under way. The play is engineered for success, and McDonagh’s stereotypical view of black maleness is a significant part of that engineering. Still, one wonders how compromised the thirty-one-year-old Anthony Mackie must feel, playing Toby, a black prole whose misadventures are central to this four-character show. Mackie recently attracted notice for his portrayal of a bomb-squad sergeant in Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq war movie “The Hurt Locker.” But even in that role he was drawing on a paradigm—Lou Gossett, Jr.,’s 1982 portrayal of a drill sergeant in “An Officer and a Gentleman.” The sad fact is that, in order to cross over, most black actors of Mackie’s generation must act black before they’re allowed to act human.