Theater: May the Farce Be With You

Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce is well worth your time. Produced by the acclaimed Irish company Druid, it’s a superb example of how to grip a creaky genre by the lapels and massage it until it resembles one so different, so transformed, it can only be characterized as the opposite of the one you started with. In this case, Walsh turns farce—a mechanical, wildly entertaining dramatic vehicle—into an engrossing family drama. Under Mikel Murfi’s masterful staging, there’s enough bloodshed for even the most fervent fans of Martin McDonough’s plays to leave with fiendish, satisfied grins.

Entering the theater, notice Sabine Dargent’s grimy and decrepit three-room set, with wooden beams and plaster exposed, the doors between rooms conspicuously missing. Doors are the oxygen that lets farce breathe; their absence in Walworth suggests that Walsh intends to burrow underneath many of the various conventions of farce—such as wordplay, exaggerated gestures, mistaken identities, high-velocity costume changes and sexual situations—to fashion an exegesis of the genre. The result is that after the first, second and third shrieks of audience delight come waves of audience shock. More often, there’s rapt silence.

Denis Conway, a doppelganger for Benny Hill, plays Dinny, the loutish father of geeky Blake, played by Garrett Lombard, an actor whose face could captivate a leprechaun convention; and there’s the handsome Sean, played by Tadhg Murphy. While Lombard and Murphy are obviously adults, their characters are ostensibly teens; most of Act 1 involves watching them—under Dinny’s doleful, baleful direction—re-enact a play that appears to pay tribute to tragic family events of yore. There was certainly death, for example: two coffins, made of heavy cardboard, that are swiftly exploited for comedic purposes. Slapstick, another spice in the stew of farce, is also poured on thick. When Dinny finds that Sean bought sausage, not chicken, from the local supermarket, Dinny clocks him with a cooking pot. This is Three Stooges comedy to be sure—but with more malevolent intent.

Dinny, you see, is certifiable—you can tell by how the ingenious Conway submerges himself in the role. Watch him sniff money stuffed into a cigar box. Or better yet, watch him rub pomade on his head, as if the soothing properties of menthol might cool his character’s inexplicable fury. It’s all the more scary to think that this bear of a man has been physically controlling his sons for many years—that Sean has been changing in and out of women’s dresses every day for as long as he can remember, assuming a different physical stance for each character until he knew his father would be satisfied. Occasionally, Dinny plays Bing Crosby’s version of “An Irish Lullaby,” a little dollop of too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra to soothe our own well-scratched heads.

Door knock; everything halts. It’s Hayley, the supermarket checkout girl, there to give Sean the chicken he bought and to take back the sausage she mistakenly packed into the wrong bag. The look on Mercy Ojelade’s face when Hayley realizes what a nuthouse she’s entered is remarkable—it’s Godot’s face when he enters the bleak land of Beckett. Indeed, Hayley represents the devastating intrusion of reality so well that Dinny now goes beyond the edge; after having Sean tie her up, Dinny has all three of them resume their innocuous play as the atmosphere turns desperate. The murders, the deaths, the awful family secrets lurking behind the silliness—this was all Dinny’s handiwork, which means there can be only one outcome to this farce. With it comes shared relief—relief that at least one or two them escaped it all alive.

Through May 4. St. Ann’s Warehouse, 38 Water St., Brooklyn; 718-254-8779; $37.50-$47.50.