Feb. 15, 2026:"A Skull in Connemara" at the ICTC


A wistful love song crackles out of a radio at the start of "A Skull in Connemara," the latest offering from the Irish Classical Theatre Company, but the play itself is more like a rough-and-tumble rumble by a band of Gaelic punk-rockers.

The sell-out crowd gave this dark comedy a standing ovation on opening night Friday, a further endorsement of the ICTC's fondness lately for uncommon staging and challenging physicality.

This time there's actual grave-digging, with the two principals tossing shovelfuls of dirt from pits onto the stage, and so much smashing with mallets that the actors ought to put in for hazardous duty pay.
It doesn't start out that way. In fact, as the audience takes its seats, Camilla Maxwell is wafting wordlessly about the stage, picking up odd objects. She's the ghost of Oona Dowd, who died under mysterious circumstances seven years earlier. She haunts the tortured mind of her widower, Mick, the overseer of a fully-subscribed cemetery, as he goes about digging her up as part of his annual assignment to remove what's left of old dead people to make room for new ones.
Ranting righteously as Mick is Robert Creighton, an award-winning arrival from Broadway and off-Broadway. He's a first-timer at the ICTC, as are Maxwell, who hails from Australia, and Phineas Goodman, a senior acting major at SUNY Fredonia, who's cast as Mairtin Hanlon, Mick's young assistant and drinking companion. If those bottles they constantly swig from were filled with actual moonshine, they'd be lucky to make it all the way through Act Two.
As it is, there is much fogginess in the air, thanks to the aerosol efforts of the stage crew before each act, and quite a few mist-shrouded issues that go unexplained at the end of the proceedings.
Along the way, there's plenty to laugh at, abetted by a pair of ICTC veterans, Pamela Rose Mangus as feisty matriarch Maryjohnny Rafferty, and Brendan Didio as police officer Thomas Hanlon. Credit also to director Mason Biggs, who guided the ICTC's "Dorian" last year and keeps the mirth and mayhem moving along merrily.
This show completes a theatrical hat trick for the ICTC. It's the second installment of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy, which follows previous productions of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and "The Lonesome West." It's around Thursdays through Sundays until March 1.

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