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Director Gordon Edelstein and set designer David Gallo find Martin McDonagh’s A Skull in Connemara humorous as well as unsettling. Front & Center recently caught up with this animated duo in a busy rehearsal room, where they explained why they chose to bring the play to life—in a graveyard.
F&C: How did you first become involved with Martin McDonagh’s work?
Edelstein: About three years ago I read Martin McDonagh’s trilogy of plays — The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West — and although I love all of Martin’s work, I fell in love with this play in particular. Beauty Queen is a masterpiece. The Lonesome West is a wonderful play. But A Skull in Connemara is a little different. It struck me as a little more Samuel Beckett-like: in fact the title is taken from a line in Waiting for Godot. It seemed as if it was taking place in a kind of parallel universe, a separate world, an island away from the real world. I directed the American premiere last year at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, where I serve as Artistic Director, and now at the Roundabout. I’ve known David since 1988 or so and I thought this play would be right up his alley. It’s his sensibility.
Gallo: My response to the piece was tremendous. I felt I have a certain affinity with the humor. Though I have a certain affinity with the violence, too. (laughter) So when Gordon called I was thrilled. I had to do it.
Edelstein: The Druid Theatre in Galway did the original productions of the Leenane trilogy. They were brilliant, but the foundation was in a kind of realism. I thought I could push this play in a slightly different direction. I wanted to make it slightly more abstract because the play feels a little like a dream or a nightmare. It’s closer to Beckett or Harold Pinter than it is to more traditional Irish drama. David responded to that idea right away and the images of this kind of strange island came to us. Although three of the four scenes take place in Mick Dowd’s house, I felt that the strongest image in the play was the graveyard, where the other scene takes place. The original productions of Beauty Queen and The Lonesome West were set in a home, and I wanted people to look at this play differently than the other two from the first moment they came into the theater, because I think it is different. I said to David, "somehow it can all take place in the graveyard." And the next thing I knew he came up with this unbelievable idea.
Gallo: Like Gordon, I didn’t feel that it ought to take place in a cottage living room. It didn’t feel like that at all to me. It felt unusual to me when the characters refer to other people who aren’t actually there in the space with them —or when they go off to talk to the priest and come back. They just sort of go off into the dust or the mist and then come back again. It has a certain surreal quality.
I think design should speak for itself on some level, but essentially we tried to preserve the sense of isolation. The perspective is forced to give a sense of depth or endlessness to this bleak landscape. There’s a murky sky-surround which will be lit a number of different ways to give it various kinds of character. The living room floats in the middle of this landscape, with no walls and no particular architecture. When it becomes the graveyard all the props go away and a series of tombstones pop up—again in perspective so there’s a sense of depth.
The doors on the sides vanish. Hopefully the graves floating on the ceiling above complete the idea that we’re in this scary graveyard. They are a dominant motif for the piece. We wanted them to give it a feel and texture and quality without turning them into giant eye magnets. In Seattle we did the production in the round and you could actually touch the gravestones from your seat. Here they’re no closer than 17 or 18 feet, and the perspective continues: as the house rakes back, the graves rake back as well. You can even read some of the names on the tombstones.
Edelstein: None of the names are important to read, but the one that’s fun is Mag Folan — from Beauty Queen — because the characters on stage mention her and the fact that she has recently died.
F&C: What kind of place is this? Why do you think McDonagh chose to write three linked plays about the same region?
Gallo: I’ve never been to Ireland and I don’t know very much about the country, so it was exciting to do a little research. When you think of Ireland, you think of the greenest, lushest, most beautiful country on earth—which it is in places. But Connemara is sort of rocky and barren, which is a bit of a surprise. There’s no grass there. It has an incredible, bleak, harsh beauty.
Edelstein: Martin McDonagh’s parents are Irish but he grew up mainly in England, spending his summers in this area. So he got to know this place well or at least developed lots of feelings about it. The plays give a slightly satirical, macabre, and violent quality to small-town backbiting and gossip-mongering (which is not just an Irish phenomenon, of course). Martin plays with the cruelties of small-town life—both the overt, violent forms of cruelty and the smaller, littler ones. All three plays are rich in language and music, and all are heartbreaking.
F&C: What’s the hardest thing about staging this play?
Edelstein: For a director, the hardest thing at first is getting the pitch and tone right. I can’t think of a more promising playwright than Martin McDonagh right now. These plays are remarkable. It’s hard to believe they were written by someone who was 27 or 28 years old at the time. Not only are they funny, they are almost perfect. Although he has digested the influences of Beckett and Pinter and Joe Orton and David Mamet, he’s coming out with his own thing. It’s so new that it can be hard just to figure out what this is.
Luckily I think we were able to get it more or less right when we did it in Seattle. McDonagh loved our production and three of the four Seattle cast members are in the Roundabout production: Zoaunne LeRoy, Kevin Tighe, and Christopher Evan Welch. (The fourth is Christopher Carley, a gifted young actor who appeared in Beauty Queen on Broadway; he brings a whole new perspective because his age is so right for his character.)
Having found the right tone, now the challenge is to dig into the deeper truths of the play, to see how deep and funny we can go. There’s so much beneath the surface and consequently so many choices are possible in rehearsal. This play has so much mystery, so much room for interpretation. That’s exciting—and daunting. But I’m blessed with a really great cast who are never satisfied to sit back on what worked yesterday so they’re always willing to explore. They make this play so much fun to do. I love this play. It is so rich and funny, so spooky and surprising, and creepy and shocking. A lot of new discoveries have been made, and there are many more to find. So we’re just digging deeper and deeper.
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