THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN (KIRK DOUGLAS THEATRE): 100% – SWEET

Ingrid Craigie, Dearbhla Molloy and Dermot Crowley in "Cripple of Inismaan" at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Photo courtesy of Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times

SWEET
Kudos to Hynes for balancing the play’s mix of mockery and truth in her internationally acclaimed production. Artistic director of the Galway-based Druid, she is an experienced hand with McDonagh, having won a Tony for her staging of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” and she works out a marvelous détente between overstatement and understatement that her cast and design team execute to perfection.
Charles McNulty – LA Times

SWEET
Director Garry Hynes’ splendid touring production of the Druid and Atlantic Theater Company staging captures the play’s full range of virtues, from uproarious characters to underlying pathos and ultimately despair.
Les Spindle – Backstage

SWEET
This is a masterpiece of comic writing, made haunting by Ms. Hynes’s perceptive understanding of what is sneakily hiding between the lines. Anyone in love with the theater would be crazy to miss The Cripple of Inishmaan.
Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema

SWEET
The writing, direction (by Garry Hynes), and all the actors are first rate.
Robert Machray – Stagehappenings

SWEET
McDonagh’s gorgeously lyrical dialogue is full of one-liners, quirky wit and biting irony, while also capturing the understated sorrow of people who believe life is nothing but suffering punctuated by loss. Like the writing, director Garry Hynes’ taut, often explosive yet intimate staging boasts both impeccable comic timing and heartrending pathos — often within a few seconds of each other. Galway’s Druid Theatre Company cast is extraordinary, crafting an ensemble of small-village archetypes who appear lovable at first but whose seething undercurrents of spite and malice become all too evident.
Paul Birchall – LA Weekly

SWEET
At any rate, it feels more at home in the Douglas, performed by the more genuinely Irish cast of Garry Hynes’ Druid Theatre tour (with New York’s Atlantic Theatre providing support). It helps if you understand, going in, that the humor is broad to an almost vaudevillian extent at times – although it still seems soft compared to McDonough’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore.
Don Shirley – LA Stage Watch

SWEET
Currently playing at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, this harshly humorous Druid and Atlantic Theater Company production is colorful with only the slightest bit of sentimentality.
Jana J. Monji – LA Examiner

SWEET
You will be both entertained and astonished, as well as saddened by it.
Georja Umano – LASplash

SWEET
The new touring company co-production from the Irish Druid theatre troupe and the New York-based Atlantic Theatre Company playing at the Kirk Douglas Theatre is about pitch-perfect, a tart slice of 1934 rural Ireland.
Terry Morgan – LAist

SWEET
If the play’s measure could be taken solely from its capacity to provide well-written dialogue and to provoke laughter, it would be an unqualified success. Yet by the time the second act is underway, the humour becomes more obviously a barrier to the subject rather than a bridge, like laughing at a funeral to keep yourself from realizing you never much liked the deceased anyway.
Frederik Sisa – Front Page Online

SWEET
If it’s sweeties you’re cravin’, go treat yourselves to The Cripple of Inishmaan for a brief immersion into some past Irish culture. But stand warned: the humor is so genuinely Irish, so authentically blunt and real, so heartwarmingly human!
Don Grigware – BroadwayWorld

“The Cripple of Inishmaan”
Kirk Douglas Theatre
9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City
8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Sundays (Call for exceptions.) Ends May 1.
Tickets: $20-$45. (213) 628-2772
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes

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