Last Night: The Alley's Behanding Is Funny When It's Not Race Baiting

Jann Whaley

(L-R) Chris Hutchison as Mervyn and Andrew Weems as Carmichael in the Alley Theatre's production of A Behanding in Spokane.

Last night, the play officially opened on the Alley's Neuhaus Stage, and the nearly-packed theater was peppered with the usual opening-night suspects: Patricia Hubbard (the Alley's Hubbard Stage namesake), Lynn Wyatt, Charles Krohn and a smattering of Alley company actors, and of course the press, made to carry big red press-pack folders for easy recognition.

By the time the audience performed its requisite opening-night standing ovation, it was a 90-minute romp of gruesome slapstick and gallows humor, plus a giant helping of inexplicable race baiting.

McDonagh's main character, Carmichael, is holed up in a seedy Ohio hotel, on the hunt for his missing hand, which was brutally amputated against his will 27 years earlier. Two hoods, a young black man and his white girlfriend, have promised to deliver Carmichael's hand for $500. Of course, it's a scam. The kids get handcuffed to a radiator while Carmichael goes on a ridiculously futile search for the appendage.

But while he's got the kids cornered in the room, Carmichael unleashes racial slur after slur against the young man, Toby. There are countless uses of the n-word, as well as homosexual slurs. Not that we're prudes; it's just that the excessiveness eventually morphs into something utterly unfunny (not that it was funny to begin with), and that's because Toby provides Carmichael with exactly the stereotype he wants to denigrate. Toby is a crying, whining, timid, suppliant, drug-dealing thief. Sean-Michael Bowles does his duty as Toby, though it's kind of sad to watch. He and Emily Neves as Marilyn both feel forced and all over the map in characterization. That's McDonagh's fault: He's written Marilyn as both a blond ditz and a smart negotiator. Doesn't work.