SYNOPSIS
Set in 1993 in County Galway on the rocky island of Inishmore, off the coast of Ireland. Padraic is a terrorist with no feeling for those he kills, yet has an obsessive attachment to Thomas, his beloved cat. But someone has murdered poor wee Thomas. Was it an accident or an execution? Either way, the death must be concealed before 'Mad Padraic' returns from a stint of torture and bombing. Otherwise the recriminations will be horrifying. Recommended for high school and adult audiences.

BEHIND THE SCENES
Click here to see the schedule for Audience Enrichment events.

Click here to check out the playbill for bios, headshots and some interesting Inishmore facts!

Click here to check out Jeff Seats' set design and some photos from the production!

PRODUCTION HISTORY
The Lieutenant of Inishmore was first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 2001. After London it began a run at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York City in February 2006, garnering several Lucille Lortel Award nominations and procuring an Obie Award for Martin McDonagh. It then transferred to the Lyceum Theatre, on Broadway in May 2006. 

Recent American runs include productions at ACT in Seattle in Fall of 2010; GableStage, in Coral Gables, Florida in 2007, and at the Alley Theatre, in the Theater District of Houston, TX in 2008. Also, Curious Theatre in Denver, Colorado produced a highly acclaimed production, featuring a live cat named Thomas. The West Coast premiere ran from April 25 to May 3 2008 at San Jose State University's Hal Todd Theatre.

PLAYWRIGHT
Martin McDonagh was born March 26, 1970 in Camberwell, London, England to Irish parents. His parents later moved back to Galway, leaving Martin and his brother (screenwriter John Michael McDonagh) in London, where Martin began collecting unemployment benefits at age 16.

During visits to Galway in the summers, McDonagh became acquainted with the dialect of English spoken in western Ireland. He would later put an exaggerated and poeticized version of this dialect to work in his plays. His ironic combination of coarse country language, primal symbolism and black humour represents a peculiar fusion of the work of John Millington Synge with the modern drama of Harold Pinter, David Mamet and British television comedy.

He was awarded Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for Most Promising Playwright in 1996. Separated into two trilogies, McDonagh’s first six plays are located in and around County Galway, where he spent his holidays as a child. The first is set in Leenane, a small village on the west coast of Ireland, and consists of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), A Skull in Connemara (1997) and The Lonesome West (1997). His second trilogy consists of The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) and The Banshees of Inisheer (which was never published, as McDonagh insisted it "isn't any good"), scattered across a trio of islands just off the coast of County Galway. His first non-Irish play, The Pillowman, is set in a fictitious totalitarian state, and premiered at the National Theatre in 2003, having been presented in a rehearsed reading in Galway in 1997. He has also penned two prize-winning radio plays, including The Tale of the Wolf and the Woodcutter.
Since then, McDonagh has focused on his first passion, film. Following the success of Six Shooter in 2006, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, McDonagh wrote and directed his first full-length feature, In Bruges (2008), for which he received the BAFTA Award for Original Screenplay and a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award nomination.
In May 2009, it was announced that a new play, A Behanding in Spokane, would premiere in New York in 2010. He is currently working on a new stage musical with composer Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson.  

"Come for the laughs, stay for the body-chopping ... It’s a hilariously funny script, but most of the laughs come in response to its characters’ blasé reactions to the carnage."  " said the Willamette Week. Read the full review here.

"dizzying," "transformative," "tawdry and liberating," "fast and furious," are just some of the accolades given by The Oregonian. Read the full review here.

 "...It’s one of the most technically challenging productions the company has done, involving not only plenty of fake blood and body parts, but various effects achieved with pneumatics, a bungee-jumping rig, and that trickiest of elements, a live cat. (Rest assured, the feline is unharmed,)" said Marty Hughley in The Oregonian. Read the full preview here.

"Not everyone will be able to giggle their way through all the eye shootings and limb hacking, although McDonagh’s characteristically tart dialogue, with its penchant for evoking choice clichés in the most radical of circumstances, won’t make it easy for anyone to stifle the odd perverse chuckle," said the LA Times.