Death is suddenly a social event in Long Beach lately.
At the Long Beach Playhouse, it pulls up a stool and listens while a retired executioner tells everyone how important he used to be. At Bembridge House, it arrives for tea, circulates among the mourners and eventually finds its way into the refreshments.
Martin McDonagh’s “Hangmen” premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2015, and then transferred to the West End and won the 2016 Olivier Award for best new play. By then, McDonagh had established his dramatic territory: comic worlds in which cruelty and laughter sit so close together that audiences sometimes feel guilty for recognizing the joke.
The play opens in 1963 with Harry Wade performing his official duty as a British executioner. Two years later, with hanging consigned to history, Harry runs an Oldham pub and eagerly discusses his former occupation, provided everyone understands that being ranked behind Albert Pierrepoint is merely a technicality. Then the peculiar and faintly menacing Mooney arrives from London.
Director Carl daSilva understands that the comedy cannot be separated from the threat; every laugh tightens it. Mitchell Dambrowski’s claustrophobic pub feels less like scenery than a trap.
Noah Wagner gives Harry the swagger of a small-town celebrity who has repeated his legend until even he believes it. Amanda Karr brings welcome steel to Alice, while Dina Hagler makes their vulnerable daughter, Shirley, the human cost of the masculine posturing around her. Trevor Hart’s Mooney is amusing, socially peculiar and increasingly impossible to dismiss — the sort of man who can make ordering a pint sound like a threat.
But death does not remain behind the Playhouse bar.
Across town, it leaves public spectacle behind, enters a 1906 Victorian home and becomes something more intimate: first grief, then social ritual and finally, a very good joke.
The Bembridge program begins with J.M. Synge’s “Riders to the Sea,” first performed in Dublin in 1904. Its story concerns a woman who has lost her husband and sons to the sea and fears losing her last surviving son.
I have never been entirely persuaded by the play. Synge expects our hearts to break for people we have barely had time to know; the mourning arrives before the characters have fully come alive.
Beginning outdoors beneath the trees helps, and two performers, Hannah McMullen as Cathleen and Catalina Tan as Nora, reach beyond the play’s formal sorrow to touch the audience with recognizable humanity.
Still, the evening finds its truest footing when it embraces comedy. Act 2 moves inside for a funeral reception disrupted by family tensions and a missing urn. The laughter brings oxygen into the experience. By Act 3, in the back garden, the production takes off as inheritance, resentment and attempted murder build toward a satisfying comic payoff with Chelsea Sykes as Jessica capably leading the charge.
The ensemble encompasses differing levels of experience, with its strongest performers setting the pace and anchoring the less-seasoned members. In the comic acts, that unevenness becomes part of the production’s charm.
Moving from porch to house to garden is the evening’s most inspired choice. Bembridge does not imitate a theater; its rooms, hallways and grounds tell the story. Tea and refreshments complete the conceit, making us guests at the gathering rather than spectators outside it.
I did not leave converted to “Riders to the Sea.” I did leave convinced by the evening Director Michael Tabor built around it. The tragedy provides the theme, but the comedies provide the heartbeat, and in Long Beach this September, death is proving surprisingly lively.
‘Hangmen’
When: Through Sept. 26
Where: Long Beach Playhouse Studio Theater, 5021 E. Anaheim St.
Cost: Prices vary
Information: lbplayhouse.org.
‘Tea with Riders to the Sea and Some Silly Acts for Thee’
When: Through Sept. 20.
Where: Bembridge House, 953 N. Park Circle.
Cost: No tickets available
Information: thebembridgehouse.org.