Chris Jones

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.

This play probes affirmative action in white-collar professions. It's mostly an attack thereupon. If there is a thesis, it's that the law treated blacks and whites differently a century ago and does the same now. Both imbalances were wrong. You might well take offense at that argument. But if you follow Mamet's logic in 'Race,' you'd argue that no white liberal could write a watchable play on this subject, anyway. He would be too scared.

The show’s lyrics ponder memory loss, depression and confusion. A typical musical number is “My psychopharmacologist and I.” This not only is a serious, substantial, dignified and musically sophisticated new American work, intensely staged by Michael Greif, but a frequently moving picture of a empathetic nuclear family whose members are struggling, like many of us, to take care of themselves and each other, and to keep the stitches in the fraught daily fabric of their everyday lives.

Fortunately for a new generation yet to see this show produced at this level, it retains the heart, soul and original moves and sounds of a theatrical masterpiece with Leonard Bernstein melodies so beautiful they reverberate deep in your chest. And yet this new production also radically updates and rejuvenates the show’s social milieu. It’s an ensemble-driven change—rather than the individual lead performances—that dominates the feeling and impact of this production.

It celebrates the mineworkers’ collective struggle with all the political passion of a Studs Terkel history. Its extensive cast of children makes you think about the cost of growing up in a world of angry adults, but also the ability of kids to transcend such a world. And it ultimately comes down to a dad (played, superbly, by Gregory Jbara) who, like most of us, doesn’t understand much about his world, except for the most important thing therein. He has to get behind his kid.