at the Centre Theater
208 Dekalb Street Norristown

610-279-1013

McDonagh skewers the pervasive image of the tipsy, sentimental Irish in Iron Age Theatre's powerful follow-up to last season's successful A Skull in Connemara, another wickedly dark and violent McDonagh comedy.
Co-directors and designers Randall Wise and John Doyle provide a huge, detailed setting, as always, creating Kate and Eileen's shop, a chapel and other locations in lavish, loving detail.
The cast likewise excels, led by Altman's fiercely independent, nakedly agonized Billy and O'Leary's mischievous, egg-pegging Helen, and completed by Steve McLean's beleaguered doctor, Judy Clifford as Johnnypateenmike's ancient, whiskey-swilling mother, and Matthew McDonough as Babbybobby, who seems like the village's most principled, mature citizen until he, too, lives down to his environment.
Spiked with running jokes about Ireland ("It might not be such a bad place if ______ want to come to it"), McDonagh's jabs at our jolly St. Patrick's Day perceptions punctuate a surprisingly touching story about hope battling despair.
Mark Cofta
Philadelphia Citypaper

John Doyle and Randy Wise, the vastly unrecognized and under-credited talents that are the direction/lighting/staging/production team as well as the spiritual will and physical essence of Iron Age Theatre, create McDonagh's rural world - in all its dirty, bloody, sweaty simplicity - with the conviction of evangelizers.
Steve Hatzai manages to find exactly the right note of obnoxious obsequiousness for Johnnypateenmike, the unpleasant scandal-mongering snitch of the working free press.
Caught in the net of Johnnypateenmike's gossip, innuendo and class snobbery is Cripple Billy. He is a sensitive boy whose entire life is informed by a disability. Cripple Billy is a difficult part demanding both dignity and pathos in carefully measured amounts. Adam Altman gets it right. His Cripple Billy has both the strength and integrity called for by the part. Altman has grown in confidence and maturity since Iron Age staged McDonagh's The Skull of Connemara last spring and it brightens his performance.
A new face in the Iron Age company is Katy O'Leary. If they'd searched for a more appropriate name for this piece it would not have been found. When O'Leary enters she doesn't look right for Helen, the proud and lovely youngster from the island whose charms are less noteworthy to outsiders from the larger world across Galway Bay.
It's a ambivalent tribute to O'Leary's performance that her success making Helen into an awful witch effectively takes the shine off her beauty. The remaining cast is uniformly strong. All together they create a smooth production that allows audiences to enter their story without having the distraction of a few performances throwing the play out of balance with strengths or weaknesses.
It would be wrong not to mention (in the vernacular of the Irish) that Kate McLenigan's collaboration with Wise on the set is once again brilliant. McDonagh has been the toast of the theater world on both sides of the Atlantic for a dozen years. The Iron Age staging is a laugh-out-loud entertainment and a fair representation of the author's intent. The effort to find Iron Age's Norristown home and see this production will be well rewarded.
Jim McCaffrey
The Evening Bulletin