August 20, 2008 Special Sections » Fall Guide

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A Tarantino film on stage 

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Chip Decker, Brett Gentile, and Dave Blamy are all hard at work on The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the brash and bloody comedy that will launch Actor's Theatre of Charlotte's 20th anniversary season. Normally, there's a wide gulf between Decker and Gentile, both certifiably insane, and the stolid, wholesome Blamy. I mean Blamy portrayed Otto Frank onstage earlier this year -- it doesn't get more serious or grounded than that.

But the borderline had begun to blur by the time the three guys huddled around a speakerphone and discussed Inishmore with me on Aug. 1. Multiple rehearsals spent suspended upside-down had obviously taken their toll on Blamy, who began to show symptoms of silliness during our conversation.

Here's a slightly edited transcript.

Creative Loafing: What has it been like to decide on this play and execute it?

Chip Decker: Well, we love Martin McDonough, and we love his writing. His theatric poetry, to read it and perform it, as evidenced in Cripple of Inishmaan, Pillowman -- it's just brilliant. I don't know whether you've gotten a chance to see his movie, Perry, In Bruges.

No.

Decker: Oh, it's wonderful. Rent it when you can. He wrote it and directed it. It's his first foray into the movie realm. Hopefully, we're not going to lose Martin to the movies, but if he keeps having success like he is, we probably will, unfortunately. He's just a brilliant writer, and a piece like this -- it's just so fricking funny. Pillowman had that nice dark timbre to it. This has that, but it's got so much humor. You catch yourself laughing and going, "Oh, shit! What am I laughing at here? You got to be kidding me! He just blew a cat up!" But in the context of the show, it's just very, very funny.

So it's a great opening piece for us, marvelously written, incredibly gruesome, and just laugh-out-loud, pee-in-your-pants funny.

Is it more political than the works we're familiar with?

Decker: You know what? It's got a message at the end, Perry. It's got a quick wrap up, moral-to-the-story-is, but it's so tongue-in-cheek -- he doesn't belabor it at all. He just comes out and goes, oh by the way, terrorism is stupid. In case you didn't realize it, terrorism sucks. Don't be a terrorist.

If there's a moral to this story, it's that killing people in the name of terrorism is pointless, and that's pretty much the overall theme.

Well, we often look at what are called to "The Troubles" in Ireland, and we think of it as some sort of righteous, religious bigotry enacted by one pious group of Christians on another. It seems to me that perhaps from the beginning, McDonagh is deconstructing that and saying, "Are you kidding!? This is Ireland, where you have a bunch of brutes and drunkards! How can you begin to believe that they have some sort of principled religious conflict up there?"

Decker: You're exactly right. He doesn't cast a good light on anybody. If you're involved in this in one way or another -- and you can apply it to the current administration -- who's the terrorist here? Is it Saddam Hussein or is it George W. Bush? It really doesn't matter who it is, it's all, in the end, pointless. We have death and destruction all around us, and what is the final outcome?

Brett! When are you finally going to break into something that's just a little more bestial? Where does this rank among the repulsive, buffoonish, thuggish things you've done?

Brett Gentile: I've made a good living being an asshole! Every time you do a new project, it becomes the pinnacle of your career, because it's fresh and you're putting all kinds of new stuff to it. To answer your question, it's right up there at the top. I've never had the honor to play a sociopath who didn't have an idea that he was a sociopath, and that's kind of where this guy sits. He has no idea. Zero idea. Everything he does is not only justified and warranted, but needed. So that's kind of an interesting take on it. The violence and the vulgarity just become kind of passe. Characters I've played in the past have been able to step away from themselves and go, "You know what? This is a little fucking crazy." But this guy doesn't do that.

Is there an overlay of difficulty in making this guy Irish?

Gentile: No, I don't think so. This has been one of the easiest reads for me, and the easiest to memorize, just because how brilliant McDonagh is with the guy. He's in very weird situations, but the situations he becomes a part of are nothing obscure for him. So he's rather cool and collected about his life. Of course, there's torment to him -- his cat, which is fucking ridiculous. I think this is going to be fairly straightforward for me. At least I'm trying to keep it simple and straightforward. I'm trying not to get too much into process and stuff like that. The simpler the better I think.

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