Brother vs. Brother on Irish Frontier

The actors playing the two comical but fratricidally-inclined brothers at the heart of Martin McDonagh’s “The Lonesome West” say they feel well-prepared by past experience for the roles they are about to create.

Now, that’s scary.

In the play, a 1999 Tony-Award nominee having its West Coast premiere this week at South Coast Repertory, the characters Coleman and Valene Connor seem capable of enacting the worst of both the Cain-and-Abel and Jacob-and-Esau models of sibling dysfunction. Valene is a miser and obsessive collector of religious figurines, who marks the initial “V” on everything he owns--and he owns everything in the old farmhouse that he and Coleman share in the isolated, impoverished rural west of Ireland.

They have just buried their father, shot dead by the drunken ruffian Coleman in a fit of rage over an insult. Valene is willing to back up Coleman’s story that it was an accident--in exchange for Coleman’s share of the inheritance. Their house guest, having officiated at the funeral, is Father Roderick Welsh, an outsider driven to drink by the harshness and callousness of his flock and the landscape they inhabit.

“God has no jurisdiction in this parish,” laments the priest in one of the many tart laugh lines with which McDonagh, a Londoner of Irish descent, enlivens his script. Even so, Father Welsh mounts a desperate bid to redeem the brothers--and himself--by instilling in them a flicker of brotherly love.

It is no easy mission. On the page, the ruthless and always funny infighting of Coleman and Valene puts one in mind of a “To the moon, Alice” Jackie Gleason, who means business, not bluster, or a Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, cloned and set against himself.

Rod McLachlan and Paul O’Brien explained in a recent interview at South Coast that professional, rather than personal experience has situated them well for their respective parts as Valene and Coleman. They won’t be employing “method” acting techniques that call for retrieving emotional memories of epic grudges and murderous rages of their own.

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O’Brien has been in McDonagh’s grimly funny world before. He played Babbybobby, a secondary character in “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” at the Geffen Playhouse in 1998. In 1997 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, he was part of another comically homicidal family in the west of Ireland, playing Old Mahon, the father who gets left for dead by his enraged son in John Millington Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World.”

McLachlan several years ago wrote and performed a one-man show, “Irregardless,” in which he portrayed “a disgruntled Irishman” living in the United States.

“He had a lot of the vituperative qualities” found in Valene, McLachlan said. “It’s so close, it felt as if I’d done all the research already.”

The actors--each Irish American on both sides and each a late-1990s transplant from New York City to Los Angeles, who came in search of screen roles--say there are particular pleasures and pitfalls to playing the comically repugnant brothers.

“How many chances do you get to kill your father in a comedy?” noted O’Brien, who has tousled, sandy-red hair and a gravelly voice.

One pitfall, they agree, is that the characters’ particularly funny brand of mutual malice could go over the top--or “To the moon,” as the Great One might have put it--escaping the gravitational pull of real feeling needed for the play to have a deeper impact.

O’Brien said he was struck by a review of the current New York City production of McDonagh’s “A Skull in Connemara,” which forms a trilogy of shared setting and overlapping characters with “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” (seen a year ago at South Coast) and “The Lonesome West.”

“It said that McDonagh’s writing rendered the characters absurd and inconsequential,” and O’Brien sees this as potentially being a problem for actors tackling Valene and Coleman. “They are so funny, I could see getting into a riff like that with the audience, where it could become just too silly.”

“The stuff we have together is structured almost like burlesque routines,” agreed McLachlan, who has thick, dark hair and a smooth, tenor voice. “The back and forth is so like a comedy duo, like a couple of Moes or Abbott and Costello. But that’s the thing to resist. It feels so natural to let it just be [comic interplay], when, in fact, it’s important for the overall meaning of the play that we’re living those lives.” That, he said, means taking the brothers seriously, even as the audience is inclined to laugh through their never-ending hostilities.

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McDonagh places most of the play’s poignancy and sympathy in its two other characters, Father Welsh and Girleen Kelleher, a tough but lovely and quick-witted teenage lass whose heart has not yet been completely stunted by the bitterness of the lonesome west. But McLachlan and O’Brien noted that the script allows each of the brothers to recall his own episode of love and loss, something that can give them depth and make them more than caricatures.

Said O’Brien: “The audience should be laughing hysterically at these fools, while, at the same time, they’re saying, ‘There’s a little bit of me in them. I’ve been that drunk, I’ve been that stupid, I’ve been that angry.’ That, to me, is when the play will work.”

For some Irish folk, McDonagh’s satire may be a bit hard to take. O’Brien and McLachlan both think the playwright’s work is a deliberate attempt to explode the romantic notion of Irishness as a combination of charming blarney and heartfelt sorrow. McDonagh points, instead, to the more bitter aspects of a national character impacted by centuries of poverty, discrimination and imperial domination by the British.

“I can imagine some productions of this play that would be offensive to a lot of people,” O’Brien said. “And even this one, I’m sure there’s going to be a few people we drive out of the theater, just from the things that are said.”

“It perfectly captures the temperament of the Irish that allows them to have the kinds of troubles that they have politically,” McLachlan said. “What you see in [Coleman and Valene] is the kind of score-keeping and the old feuds that can’t be let go. [Director Martin Benson] was saying it’s almost as if you dishonor all the suffering you’ve done up to this point if you forgive or let anything slide. This play also captures essentially how Irish it is to in one way deal with everything with a sense of humor, but also to lurch precipitously from deep feeling into comedy and then back again.”

“You’ve heard the joke about Irish Alzheimer’s,” O’Brien said. “You forget everything but the grudges. It’s a joke, but all these cliches come from something. But I think the deeper we go [as actors], the more real we make these people, the more sort of dignity we give their peasant life, the less of an insult it is to the Irish.”

O’Brien and McLachlan both have visited the lonesome west of Ireland. That, too, they said, has proven to be an important grounding for taking on the roles of brothers locked in a seemingly pointless war.

“It’s a remarkable place,” McLachlan said. “For all the lushness and greenness it has, it’s also kind of lunar--a lonely, desolate place. And these [characters] live lives that are dangerously understimulated and they’re trapped there. They have not the means to get out. It is totally psychologically correct that these bizarre personalities could emerge from such a desolate place.”

Yet, O’Brien said, “One of the dangers in this play is to think of them as too far away from us or too different from us. Anybody could be like this, given the situation they’re stuck in and given the stuff that they’re drinking and the place that they’re trapped in. Not many people would turn out otherwise.”

SHOW TIMES

“The Lonesome West,” South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays through Sundays, 7:45 p.m., matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Previews through Thursday, regular performances begin Friday. $18-$47, with a pay-what-you-will matinee on Saturday. Ends April 15. (714) 708-5555.