Set on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland in 1934, The Cripple of Inishmaan is a strange comic tale in the great tradition of Irish storytelling. As word arrives on Inishmaan that the Hollywood director Robert Flaherty is coming to the neighboring island of Inishmore to film Man of Aran, the one person who wants to be in the film more that anybody is young Cripple Billy, an unloved boy whose chief occupation has been gazing at cows and yearning for a girl who wants no part of him. So he is determined to cross the sea and audition for the Yank, and as news of his audacity ripples through the rumor starved community, it becomes a merciless portrayal of a world so comically cramped and mean-spirited that hope is an affront to its order. Filled with a cast of extraordinary characters and unexpected plot turns, The Cripple of Inishmaan promises to take the audience along on Cripple Billy's crazy journey of hope and discovery.

The cast for NSU's production will feature Rory K. Behrens as Cripple Billy, Sarah Kenny and Samantha Banner as Kate and Eileen, the aunts who took Billy in after the death of his parents, Amber Noble is Helen, the object of Billy's interest and Zered Felt as her slightly doltish brother Bartley. Tony Kollman will appear as the town gossip and purveyor of news Johnnypatteenmike and Kellyanne Kirkland will appear as Mammy, his alcoholic mother. Rounding out the cast will be Adam Sahli as BabbyBobby and Adam Harmon as Doctor McSharry. NSU Director of Theatre, Daniel Yurgaitis, directs the play, while NSU Technical Director Larry Wild will do the scenic and lighting design. The entire production will be stage-managed by Sara Pillatzki and the assistant director will be Kellyanne Kirkland.

The Cripple of Inishmaan will be presented for four performances, beginning February 16th through the 19th, at 7:30 pm nightly on the mainstage of the Johnson Fine Arts Center on the campus of NSU. Tickets are $8.00, $7.00 for students and seniors. There are group rates available for groups of 10 or more. All seats are reserved and tickets will be available in the NSU bookstore beginning on Monday, February 7th, or by mail. Call the NSU Bookstore at 626- 2655 or the NSU Department of Theatre at 626-2563 for additional information.

Martin McDonagh's career began in London where he was born of two Irish parents, a father who worked in construction and a mother who was a part-time housekeeper in London. McDonagh left school at the age of 16, deciding that college was not for him and moved in with his brother Jim, while his parents returned to Ireland. As McDonagh recalls of the next ten years with his brother, "we were both unemployed; we spent ten years on the dole. Those were fun years." His interest in film and television guided his earliest writing, influenced by the work of Orson Welles, Martin Scorese and David Lynch. The theatre began to become a possibility after he saw a production of David Mamet's American Buffalo. During that time McDonagh wrote constantly and had 22 radio scripts rejected by the BBC.

Then he would write what would become his first major success, The Beauty Queen of Leenane in just eight days. Of this, he remembers hearing the dialogue of the characters "like it was a conversation heard in my head." McDonagh turned to plays only after he had failed at not only scripts for radio shows, but also feature films and television.

How does he approach the writing of a new play? "I begin by sharpening six pencils and laying them out. My first draft is done in pencil, on a pad. I do three pages a day. I like the speed of a pencil. Then I type it up. That's my second draft, and I make changes while I type. Sometimes that's it. Other times I pencil in changes on the typed pages." A big fan of the movies, McDonagh tries to bring "as many cinematic elements into theatre as possible."

He burst onto the scene in London in 1997 with a production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Royal Court Theatre, part of a trilogy that would soon be joined that season at the Royal Court by productions of A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. With the premiere of The Cripple of Inishmaan at the National Theatre that same season, Martin McDonagh (at age 27) had four plays on stage in London at the same time- a remarkable feat for the novice playwright! The American Repertory Theatre's Robert Brustein calls McDonagh "the first great dramatist of the twenty-first century."

McDonagh will be represented again on Broadway this spring when his recent Olivier award-winning London hit The Pillowman will open in April, directed by John Crowley who directed the original production at the National Theatre.

The Aran Islands are situated outside Galway at the west coast of Ireland. The group of three islands consists off Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer. Today some 1400 people call the islands home. It is thought that because its location was so isolated and with its lack of a harbor, western culture never really took root there. The island features bare, stony landscapes and inhabitants must work hard to eke out a living. The Celtic language, Gaelic, is still everyday speech, and many of the elderly residents know no other language. The Aran Islands' most famous resident was playwright John Millington Synge whose plays Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World were based on people, experiences and tales from Inishmaan.

Today the Islands play an important part in preserving that ancient Celtic culture. The most famous of the handicraft methods preserved is the famous Aran sweaters, which are knitted in almost every home. Shoes of cow-skin are manufactured and worn by men in the fields as well as artfully decorated belts, hand-woven trousers and vests of traditional design. The island of Inishmaan didn't receive electricity until late in 1975, so farming was done as it had been done at the turn of the century. Since there is so much rock to work around, the small patches of farm are cultivated by hand, threshing is still done with a sickle and sowing is mowed. The landscape is so rocky that seaweed is used as improvised soil. Other than farming, generations of Aranians have bred sheep and cattle and fished. The homes on the island are traditional cottages with thatched roofs, earth floors and an open fire to withstand rain, cold weather and wind.

Many interesting and intriguing legends have always been associated with the remote Aran Islands, and nothing did more to enhance those legends than Robert Flaherty's 1934 film Man of Aran. Flaherty first achieved worldwide recognition with his 1923 documentary Nanook of the North, which chronicled the lives of the Eskimo people who lived on the Belcher Islands off the coast of Canada. The major theme, which interested Flaherty, was the timeless and ancient struggle of man and nature. He would have the opportunity to explore this theme in his film depicting survival in the Aran Islands.

To exemplify the story, Flaherty selected a real family from the islands as the protagonists in his story. It was harder than he initially thought to convince these naturally wary people to participate in this most foreign enterprise, but eventually Flaherty wore them down. To play his family unit, he acquired the services of Mickleen Dillane as the young boy, Maggie Dirrane as the woman, and the Coleman 'Tiger' King as the man of Aran.

Since Flaherty felt the story would evolve as it was shot, great quantities of film were shot daily. Eventually the process would last nearly two years. Many legends and myths surrounded the shooting of the film, no doubt that was what interested Martin McDonagh in this as a key plot device. Joe McMahon (who wrote an article on the film) noted "all in all he was to shoot over 500,000 feet of film… in one day alone, using two cameras, he shot 5,600 feet."

Vincent Browne summarizes the plot in his profile: "The film itself is very simple in structure. It portrays the family's attempts to survive the barren landscape and the mountainous fear that surrounds it. It opens with some peaceful scenes of Mickleen fishing and Maggie tending her baby and looking after domestic animals. A fishing scene follows which initially takes place in calm seas which soon begin to rage, the family almost losing their stock of fishing nets. We then see man and wife making the earth for a potato crop by laying down seaweed on the bare rock. Meanwhile, Mickleen is shown fishing from a precipice at the edge of an immense cliff, an activity that seems suicidally nonchalant. Next follow the centerpiece of the film, the prolonged shark hunt, which is followed by the famous final sea scenes which are among the most powerful (and dangerous) ever filmed."

While the film seemed to audiences a portrayal of contemporary Aran life, it actually was a somewhat "romanticized notion of what life was like in the 19th century almost 100 years before." (Browne) Importantly, the major sequence of the shark hunt with harpoons hadn't even been a way of life for the previous 90 years (the oil extracted from the liver of the sharks was replaced first by paraffin and later electricity), but Flaherty needed "a central hook upon which to expand his heroic metaphors" (Browne). His assistant Pat Mullen managed to find one surviving fisherman who actually knew how it had been done in the old days to teach them how to do it. The dangerous shark hunt shoot could have easily smashed the boat and the fisherman, but happily proceeded without disaster. Mullen's account of the treacherous shoot minimized the dangers: "a great thrill of wild pride shot through me as I looked at them, for here had been a trial of the old, old stock and the blood ran true."

The film turned out to be a success both commercially and critically, going on to win the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 1935. Critic Pauline Kael of the New Yorker Magazine has hailed the film as "the greatest film tribute to man's struggle against a hostile nature."

Link to the Man of Aran entry in the Internet Movie Database.

"[Playwright Martin] McDonagh has become one of the great glowing hopes of the English-speaking theatre." The New York Times

"This is a hysterical, smart, wicked, wildly original work." Newsday

"The play is very, very funny. McDonagh's talent for taking banal dialogue and giving it a subtly demented twist is given free reign." The New York Daily News

"Young McDonagh is a playwright to reckon with… his comic talent appears unlimited." The New York Post

" McDonagh is a strong story teller with a quirky sense of characterization. He adeptly mixes both the tragic and comical sides of life into a compelling unity that keeps audiences guessing how it will all turn out." Newark Star-Ledger

"The Cripple of Inishmaan prompts the gratifying shiver of excitement one feels at encountering a true original." Variety

Title:The Cripple of Inishmaan Playwright: Martin McDonagh Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, (Vintage, 1st edition) Published 1998 ISBN: 0375705236 The Cripple of Inishmaan at Amazon.com.

Robert J. Flaherty's Man of Aran (1934)

Director: Robert J. Flaherty Format: Black & White Rated: (NR) Not rated Studio: Home Vision Entertainment DVD Release Date: May 20, 2003 Run Time: 77 ASIN: B00008UALI DVD: Man of Aran at Amazon.con.