He’s Caught in a Cycle of Violence

Three springs ago in New York, Martin McDonagh’s Irish nasty known as “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” hit audiences like a crack to the skull.

The first of the young dramatist’s plays to reach America by way of huge success in London, it got a lovely airing in director Garry Hynes’ imported production. Without trying to inflate McDonagh’s melodrama--which on its own cruel, visceral terms is extremely effective--Hynes played down his jokey nihilist’s streak. Her staging brought out the harder stuff, the inner ticking of the characters stuck in the fictional splat on the map known as Leenane, located in the rural, nonfictional and highly violence-prone County Galway.

The more McDonagh plays you see in performance, though, the more you wonder: Is McDonagh stuck in a rut?

“The Lonesome West,” now in its West Coast premiere at South Coast Repertory, takes us back to Leenane. (The third play in McDonagh’s Leenane trilogy, “A Skull in Connemara,” is playing in New York.) This time we’re witnessing the mortal combat waged by two brothers in the tiny home they so uneasily share.

And this time the combat grinds on, audibly--even with a strong cast.

Inspired by Sam Shepard’s “True West,” “The Lonesome West” more or less takes its brotherly hate for granted. The elder sibling Coleman Connor (Paul O’Brien) and the younger, Valene (Rod McLachlan), have just returned from the burial of their father. Coleman “accidentally” killed him with a shotgun blast.

To the self-loathing dismay of the Guinness-swilling local priest, Father Welsh (J. Todd Adams), the Connor men have little to live for but their private, lifelong game of “Can You Top This?” Valene’s prized collection of spiritual figurines sits on the mantel above the gas stove he has just purchased. Those figurines will meet a bad end, surely, at the hands of Coleman.

Back and forth they go, like Laurel and Hardy in “Tit for Tat,” only with howls of anguish. McDonagh takes the glorious, ambiguous blood sport of Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World” and cranks up the meanness to suit the Tarantino age. Everyone is fueled by the poteen sold by Girleen (Amy Chaffee), a local bruiser who torments Father Welsh with her wanton ways. The priest is known as “Father Welsh Walsh Welsh” to the others, since no one can recall his name.

McDonagh’s skill with dialogue is formidable, wedded to a knack for suspense, a handy theatrical way with shotguns, knives and boiling water. His mellifluous, multifaceted use of Irish curse words is uniquely his. But “The Lonesome West” has a hollow ring. The mood swings are random and rather clunky. When one character indulges in McDonagh’s most lurid bit of violence, it seems merely a cheap way of providing an Act 1 climax.

Director Martin Benson has cast his brothers well. Swaggering around scenic designer Angela Balogh Calin’s mean little house, O’Brien exudes a quiet, seedy upper-handedness, and he has a wonderfully self-satisfied way of coughing. McLachlan has a naturally musical delivery, without laying on the blarney or begging for sympathy. Adams and Chaffee, the latter uncertain with her dialect, share a mournful, nicely acted moonlit scene.

By now, McDonagh is certifiably a victim of his own international popularity. “The Lonesome West”--the first play McDonagh wrote, and in callow ways it shows--must now compete with “Beauty Queen” as well as “A Skull in Connemara” (whose central murder is referred to in “Lonesome West”) and, part of a separate trilogy, “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” The last received a wobbly West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, leaving many people scratching their heads: So what’s the big deal with this guy?

For “Beauty Queen” alone, McDonagh is a big deal. But “The Lonesome West” is small potatoes, boiled right along with those figurines.

* “The Lonesome West,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. Ends April 15. $26-$47. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

J. Todd Adams: Father Welsh

Paul O’Brien: Coleman Connor

Rod McLachlan: Valene Connor

Amy Chaffee: Girleen Kelleher

Written by Martin McDonagh. Directed by Martin Benson. Scenic and costume design by Angela Balogh Calin. Lighting by Paulie Jenkins. Fight coordinator Jamison Jones. Production manager Tom Aberger. Stage manager Vanessa J. Noon.