Word: lonergans
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Jonelle M. Lonergan ’02, an English concentrator in Winthrop House, is photography chair of The Crimson. This summer, she is working as a junior dean at Trinity College and developing a taste for beers other than Guinness...
...lobby of a New York City apartment building, four people--a flaky overnight security guard, his boss, a rookie female cop and her veteran partner--grapple with a murder investigation and issues of loyalty and betrayal. Lonergan, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (You Can Count on Me) and playwright (This Is Our Youth, The Waverly Gallery) weaves an intriguing tale that keeps one glued to the stage for two hours. But too many sitcom-style laughs and contrived character twists betray this off-Broadway comedy-drama as a slick but disposable confection...
...this is watchable enough, because Lonergan writes sharp dialogue and has more respect for plot than many playwrights these days. But none of it sticks to the ribs. Some blame goes to the actors (as Dawn, the female cop, Heather Burns has no street cred at all) and to Mark Brokaw's direction, which is too broad. But the fault lies mostly with Lonergan, who betrays his much vaunted realism with contrivance and cheap laughs at every turn. Example: Jeff, the cutely self-aware nincompoop, doesn't want to betray his boss's confidence, so he tells the whole story...
...arrived (at off-Broadway's Gramercy Theater), the critics seem to have lost interest. True, McDonagh's mordant vision of rural Irish life is pretty familiar by now, and "Connemara" does not have the structural neatness or the tragic force of "Beauty Queen." But it has something that Lonergan's plays don't have: a resonance outside the theater...
...fellow's late wife. She turns out to have a huge gash in her skull, implying that her husband might have murdered her. Much of this, believe it or not, is played for laughs (in one scene the pair smash a skeleton to smithereens), but McDonagh's comedy, unlike Lonergan's, never seems pasted on, or patronizing. We never lose sight of the dark drama beneath it: the harrowing picture of human beings driven half-mad by lives of crabbed, inbred isolation...