2014-351 Arts - Deep Dish Theater Company for Spring 2014 Arts Grant Agreement $2,801

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Indy Week N-1 5! ".. ......._j ..;1 The bleakly hilarious Cripple of/nishmaanat Deep Dish Theater by Byron Woods Stereotypes, as we know, are so politically incorrect. Far be it from me, then, to suggest that the villagers on the remote Irish isle of Inishmaan all seem to be running a quart low on the milk of human kindness. But how often do you see an audience for a film (or "fill-um," in the local brogue) about fishermen root for the sharks instead? Or a wee young slip of lass—and a gifted murderer of assorted barnyard animals—complain that, as far as she's concerned, Pontius Pilate got a raw deal in the New Testament? Still, Ireland can't be all that bad a place—not, that is, as long as it turns out comedies as rewarding as Martin McDonagh's gleefully bleak opus from 1996, The Cripple ofinishmaan. The town of the title is a community where woes and misfortunes are cultivated, and no silver lining survives the relentless search for even the faintest wisps of gray. If schadenfreude is the chief form of entertainment on this benighted island of busybodies, McDonagh quickly convinces us that's mainly because it's the most abundant source. Under Tom Marriott's direction, Kate and Eileen (the rewarding Julie Oliver and Marcia Edmundson) could have made the Olympic team in worrying as the proprietors of the island's meager grocery store and adoptive aunts to the title character. A smug johnnypateenmike (played nonchalantly by Kevin Silva) hzs found a unique way to monetize being the town gossip. An amiable but slow- witted Bartley (Andrew Crabtree), Kate and Eileen's most frequent customer., invariably requests every form of candy this store will never have. Meanwhile, Bartley's martial, plain-spoken sister, Helen (Samantha Rahn), expresses her tenderest sentiments in a vocabulary of noogies, Indian burns and airborne eggs.