Even for a Martin McDonagh protagonist, Harry is an unusually prolific killer. He’s put 233 men in their graves. Yet Harry is not as delighted with his lot as you’d think: he’s merely the second-best executioner in town, and we’ll meet both in Hangmen (at the Linda Gross Theater through March 7 and expected at Broadway’s Cort Theatre a few weeks later). Any new play by McDonagh, the celebrated Anglo-Irish dramatist and filmmaker, constitutes an event, and this one is as viperishly funny as the norm. Considering the play in conjunction with McDonagh’s recent Oscar-nominated film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, though, is instructive and clarifying. What unifies the two works is breathtakingly unserious.
We open in familiar territory for a McDonagh work: a man is getting hilariously killed. Hennessy (Gilles Geary), the condemned, is being wrestled toward the noose by prison guards as Harry stands impatiently. There’s entirely too much wailing and fighting back and clinging to the furniture for Harry’s no-nonsense taste, but Hennessy insists he was not guilty, has never been to the town where he is accused of murdering a girl, and further has never committed crimes against women. This all means nothing to Harry, whose job is not to decide what is just but simply to carry out orders. “If you’d only relax, you could be dead by now,” one guard tells Hennessy. With his dying breath, Hennessy curses his executioners.
We open in familiar territory for a McDonagh work:
