{"id":183,"date":"2006-04-18T11:18:24","date_gmt":"2006-04-18T16:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/index.php\/2006\/04\/16\/pied-pipers-of-grimm\/"},"modified":"2006-05-12T20:37:07","modified_gmt":"2006-05-13T01:37:07","slug":"pied-pipers-of-grimm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2006\/04\/pied-pipers-of-grimm\/","title":{"rendered":"Pied Pipers of Grimm"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6>Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock<\/h6>\n<p>Not to be outdone, we in the Ozarks have a playwright equal to the latest Irish sensation Martin McDonagh.<\/p>\n<p>Salvatore O&#8217;Mally of Farmington, Ark., has an even more larcenous soul than McDonagh. It&#8217;s a wonder he isn&#8217;t as well-known. McDonagh got an eight-page profile in the March 6, 2006, <em>New Yorker<\/em>. The venerable weekly magazine did not hyperlink to it, or I&#8217;d connect to it here. That means only one thing: Martin is worth buying that issue for, as the ol&#8217; <em>Yorker<\/em> posts only routine stuff and political reportage with the key material acting as carrots for which you need a subscription, a newsstand or a library card.<\/p>\n<p>McDonagh is so hot he&#8217;s only 35 years old but has not written a play in more than 10 years, correspondent Fintan O&#8217;Toole reports. He also notes the incredible fact that in 1997, putting the dramatist at age 26, Marty had four plays on stage, a feat matched only by Shakespeare.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll get back to Sal O&#8217;Mally. First, we have to explain where he got his oeuvre (not <em>Stella Got Her Oeuvre Back.)<\/em>, which is his close study of McDonagh. McDonagh in turn is said to come from punk music (Clash) and punk movies (Tarantino).<\/p>\n<p>Marty&#8217;s seven plays include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>The Lonesome West,<\/em> where a man&#8217;s also adult brother melts the first guy&#8217;s collection of Catholic saint figurines. Oh, and the pyro brother kills their father for not liking his hairstyle.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Lieutenant of Inishmore,<\/em> where the title character tortures and dismembers humans but is sweet on his cat.<\/li>\n<li><em>A Skull in Connemara,<\/em> where a priest hires two men to collect and break the bones in a churchyard to make room for fresh bodies. <em>The New Yorker<\/em> implies some necrophilia, too.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Pillowman, <\/em>where a writer spins grisly tales for his brain-damaged brother and we learn those stories of child murders actually happen: Who dunnit? The title character persuades children not yet killed to commit suicide.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Beauty Queen of Leenane,<\/em> where a woman &#8212; and you thought Marty was all over sick men &#8212; pours boiling oil on her mother&#8217;s hand and later beats her to death with a poker.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The literati of London say these are comedies &#8212; Google McDonagh and his titles and see if I&#8217;m making this up &#8212; and so are the works of Sal O&#8217;Mally.<\/p>\n<p>O&#8217;Mally prefers American hillbillies to the fishing people of Ireland&#8217;s west coast and Aran Islands, McDonagh&#8217;s turf (and surf). Problem is, Sal can&#8217;t get anyone to produce his plays. No one will read past the first couple of pages, even hip university types.<\/p>\n<p>On second thought, I cannot relate Sal&#8217;s plots here. I don&#8217;t want to cost this blog its child-friendly status (I avoid naughty words and naughty themes). Marty&#8217;s works must be OK for all ages, though, because pros in New York have produced six of his seven plays (that one, <em>Banshees of Inisheer,<\/em> is &#8220;no good&#8221; and no one has touched).<\/p>\n<p>Besides, you ever watch cartoons? Neither Sal nor Marty ever gets as raw as lots of those. -30-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Not to be outdone, we in the Ozarks have a playwright equal to the latest Irish sensation Martin McDonagh. Salvatore O&#8217;Mally of Farmington, Ark., has an even more larcenous soul than McDonagh. It&#8217;s a wonder he isn&#8217;t as well-known. McDonagh got an eight-page profile in the March 6, 2006, New [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-course-of-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":26,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2006\/01\/surpassing-expectations-ltd\/","url_meta":{"origin":183,"position":0},"title":"Surpassing expectations, Ltd.","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"January 4, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Surpassing expectations by accepting limits Wednesday 4 January 2006. Last issue, The New Yorker praised James Agee. Actually, it was New Yorker movie critic David Denby. (If I don't always agree with Denby, he's about the only current writer who every once in a while\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;The Course of Words&quot;","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":463,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2008\/07\/a-little-magazine\/","url_meta":{"origin":183,"position":1},"title":"A Little Magazine","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"July 25, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"For decades, The New Yorker arrived 52 weeks a year, on the same day, must've been Tuesday, in Mom and Dad's mailbox in Fort Smith. Rarely, it came on Wednesday. A little while before it dropped to 47 issues annually, the regular day ended, annoying Mom to no end. It\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;The Course of Words&quot;","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":147,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/05\/mothers-day-2005\/","url_meta":{"origin":183,"position":2},"title":"Mother&#8217;s Day 2005","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"May 8, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Sunday, May 8, 2005: An ode to Mother's Day. It's the first one since Mom passed last November. I've started reading a new, and perhaps the only so far, full biography of Ogden Nash. Here is a lede that won't work in my eventual newspaper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Life Lessons&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":273,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/02\/good-words-to-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":183,"position":3},"title":"&#8220;Good Words to You&#8221;","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"February 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Fishing around for a headline to this, I remembered the above. It's the outcue for the audio column on NPR's Morning Edition that the late poet John Ciardi used to do in the early to mid-1980s. He considered origins, histories and roots of words in them. Posthumously, in 1987, Harper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;The Course of Words&quot;","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2389,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2010\/11\/begetting-books\/","url_meta":{"origin":183,"position":4},"title":"Begetting Books","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"November 4, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"It's been some three decades since I last watched them do it, and I can't quite replicate it. I wish I could multitask like my parents, who excelled at the feat before it had a name. There's one round of activities of theirs that I envy. They could read mysteries\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Life Lessons&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":67,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2004\/10\/thinks-hes-a-comedian\/","url_meta":{"origin":183,"position":5},"title":"Thinks he&#8217;s a comedian","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"October 27, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2004 Ben S. Pollock Thursday, October 27, 2004. \"The Wall Street Journal\" today in a feature recalled Gracie Allen's 1940 run for president, noting also Eddie Cantor's in 1932 and Will Rogers in 1928 and also 1932. And it mentioned Pat Paulsen's runs in 1968, '72 and '76. No\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;News, Spin&quot;","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}