Ithaca College

On Thursday, November 19th, at 6:30 p.m., the On the Verge play-reading series will present a staged reading of The Cripple of Inishmaan, which was written in 1996. The cast will include Theatre Department faculty members Susannah Berryman, Kathleen Mulligan and Judy Levitt; English Department faculty members Kevin Murphy and Michael Twomey; and Ithaca College Theatre majors. It will be directed by Claire Gleitman.

The Cripple of Inishmaan was written by Martin McDonagh, the leading “bad boy” dramatist writing about Ireland today. McDonagh’s plays are notable for their gleeful irreverence when it comes to every sacred cow in Irish culture—and the term “sacred cow” applies literally here. The play takes place in 1934 on the remote island of Inishmaan, a place so dreary that there is little to do apart from staring at cows and, occasionally, pelting stones at them. Life becomes enlivened when a Hollywood director comes to a nearby island in order to make a film about its inhabitants. Most excited by the news is Cripple Billy, an earnest young misfit whom the other islanders treat with scorn. The arrival of the film crew offers him his one opportunity for adventure, stardom, and – most precious of all – escape. The play is a darkly comic send-up of more reverential portraits of rural Ireland, as well as a tradition of Irish drama represented most famously by J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Whereas story-telling and the poetic imagination offer a route to freedom in Playboy, they serve primarily to deceive and disappoint in The Cripple – a play that, for all of its comedy, is unflinching in its portrait of a material reality that is inescapable.