Through the Darkness, Laughing

 

Matthew Kropschot as Mooney.
Photo by Dave Lepori.

San Jose Stage

Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen

April 6, 2024

Hangmen takes us to a Manchester pub in 1965, shortly after the executioner/publican, Harry, has been involuntarily retired by the UK’s abolition of hangings. Harry (Will Springhorn, Jr.) is a little miffed by the situation, and expresses his vast array of opinions to a journalist, Clegg (Matthew Locke). The subsequent article turns Harry into a local celebrity.

At first, quite frankly, the play seems like a bloody mess. The regulars are all yell-talking (the way drunks do) in broad Northern accents, and one wonders how a storyline’s going to fight its way through. Soon, however, one begins to see the logic of McDonagh’s delivery system. The newly ego’d Harry initiates the process by tossing out a heady pronouncement from the bar. Said idea is duly amended by the surly Inspector Fry (Michael Champlin) and amusingly misinterpreted by bespectacled regular Bill (Nick Mandracchia, looking a little like Elvis Costello). The half-deaf elder, Arthur (Randall King), asks what’s going on, and his assistant Charlie (Michael Storm) explains in overly blunt (but completely accurate) terms. Arthur then delivers his appellate summary, which, thanks to King’s masterful timing, is always funny.

Into this well-oiled philosophers’ den walks Mooney (Matthew Kropschot), a blond Yardbird from swingin’ London equipped with scads of charm underlain with a Deniro-like menace. As it turns out, Mooney is conspiring with Harry’s former assistant, Syd (Keith Pinto), to “bring Harry down a peg.” The problem is, the youngster is getting a little addicted to his powers. After escorting Harry’s teenage daughter Shirley (Carley Herlihy) to a seaside town, he returns to the pub to deliver a rambling but mesmerizing monologue about the perils that he may or may not have just set into motion. The entire second act plays out in suspense-saturated air, as McDonagh continually leaves us hanging (pun absolutely intended).

Springhorn, Jr. provides a solid sphere of narcissism and delusion around which Kropschot spins his dazzling satellites. Herlihy endows Shirley with an endearing packet of adolescent tortures, while her desperate mother Alice, played by Judith Miller, provides the play’s emotional center. Julian Lopez-Morillas makes a late entrance as Harry’s former boss, Pierrepoint, delivering a dressing down on all and sundry that verges on pyrotechnics.

Director James Reese succeeds in extracting a maximum dose of humor out of a very dark story. I found myself continually laughing and then thinking, “Why am I laughing at this?” If I had to come up with a tagline for the production, it would be, “Stupidity is much more dangerous than injustice.”

Through April 28 at The Stage, 490 S. First St., San Jose. $34-$74. www.thestage.org, 408/283-7142.

Michael J. Vaughn is a 40-year opera and theater critic and author of the novels Punks for the Opera and Mermaids’ Tears, available on Amazon.com.