Written by MARTIN MCDONAGH
Directed by MATTHEW DUNSTER
Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20th Street
Run time: 2 hours and 15 minutes with 1 brief intermission

In his small pub in the northern English town of Oldham, Harry is something of a local celebrity. But what’s the second-best hangman in England to do on the day they’ve abolished hanging? Amongst the cub reporters and pub regulars dying to hear Harry’s reaction to the news, his old assistant Syd and the peculiar Mooney lurk with very different motives for their visit.

Following a sell-out run at London’s Royal Court Theatre and subsequent transfer to the West End, Olivier and Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh (Atlantic/Broadway’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Cripple of Inishmaan) returns to Atlantic with his first US premiere in 8 years!

“Hangmen is a triumphant return for Martin McDonagh! The sound of a playwright’s reasserting his singular voice is among the most pleasing experiences one can have in the theater, and it isn’t long into Hangmen before you can practically feel the audience grinning as one. McDonagh remains in command of an irrepressible gift.” – The New York Times

It isn’t hard to imagine that somewhere in Martin McDonagh’s attic there is an appallingly bad script with putrefied pages, because thus far, even his flawed work is compelling when counterbalanced against that of anyone but himself. Going back to the first McDonagh play this reviewer saw, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, it seemed as if whoever was responsible for writing this black and bloody Irish sectarian escapade must be a) a prospective if not frustrated filmmaker, possibly with a strong disregard for the conventions of theater, b) the possessor of punk sensibilities and c) far from cultivated or dulled by theatre school training. Further investigation confirmed these suspicions but the content of McDonagh’s output over the years has been far from predictable. Unemployed at 24, he wrote half a dozen hit plays in under a year. His venture into writing and directing films produced Oscar-winning short Six Shooter followed by the feature-length In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths and the current Oscar contender Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. McDonagh has reclined back into his theater seat with Hangmen, currently playing at the off-Broadway Atlantic Theater (home to earlier pre …Read more