The Play's the Thing

There are two words that never fail to excite me when it comes to theater (and nowadays, film): Martin McDonagh. The Pillowman was the first play I ever saw on stage, and to this day remains the best production I've ever seen. It was perfect. And it led me to devour the rest of McDonagh's body of work, and ultimately, he became one of my biggest influences as a playwright. He truly is a genius. His work over the last seven or eight years, however, has had diminishing returns. And yet, still admirable. McDonagh is writing out of his comfort zone, getting more creative, no longer writing what he knows. Granted, something like The Beauty Queen of Leenane is brilliant but McDonagh could not write plays about small town Irish life forever. And I love that he himself acknowledged this and is branching out. Quite frankly, if you ask me, between his plays and his movies, no two works are alike (even the plays that are connected.) So when his Olivier-winning play Hangmen was announ...