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Arts & Entertainment Preview - February 1998 B Y   N A N C Y   D A L V A   &   J O H N   I S T E L Writer on the Rise Scene from The Cripple of Inishmaan If Angela's Ashes didn't knock the blarney out of you, Martin McDonagh's fierce and funny dramatic fables should. A twenty-seven-year-old Londoner born to Irish parents, McDonagh dropped out of school at sixteen and started writing "to avoid having a real job." He's got one now. This month marks the second anniversary of his debut with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, at the Druid Theatre Company, in Galway, Ireland. Since then, like no other playwright in modern memory, McDonagh has enjoyed meteoric success and accolades (he has had four critically acclaimed plays running simultaneously in London). Offering further adulation feels a bit like bringing a beer into an Irish bar. But crack open the script of, say, The Cripple of Inishmaan, available in the Paris Review (Spring 1997) -- the longest piece the magazine has run since Philip Roth's novella Goodbye, Columbus -- and the dialogue rocks and reels off the page, summoning the guardian spirits of Synge, Beckett, and O'Casey. Better yet -- go see Beauty Queen, which, with three out of four members of the original cast, has its U.S. premiere off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company (212-239-6200) on February 11, or catch The Cripple of Inishmaan when it opens on March 10 at New York's Public Theater (212-260-2400), under Jerry Zaks's direction. But be warned. McDonagh's Eire is an anti-Eden, peopled by characters as earthbound as peat and potatoes and as acerbic and bitter as the home-distilled poteen with which they drink themselves toward unattainable dreams. Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, McDonagh views his plays as "just stories ... little things." But like coal compressed for millennia, these tiny tales yield glimmerings of light. --J.I. Must-Sees From the Winter Repertory George Balanchine's Firebird To see a dancer grow in a company, moving from the back row to center stage; to see a company grow in a dance, with newcomers taking on old roles in new ways: these are the abiding pleasures of attending dance programs not from time to time but all the time, as much as one can. My home-town ballet company happens to be The New York City Ballet, and in February it promises to be a superlative refuge. The winter repertory includes forty-seven works, among them significant "last chances" (final performances before a ballet goes out of rep for a time) and re-entries from the Balanchine canon. Not to miss: the returning 1967 three-act dazzler Jewels, and the departing Scotch Symphony, a misty and tender work one might think of as Balanchine's Brigadoon. Also back: Divertimento No. 15, set to Mozart; Duo Concertant, set to Stravinsky, as is the fabulous star vehicle Firebird (whose originator, Maria Tallchief, set the stage ablaze); and other Balanchiniana, including that indispensable benchmark of modernity The Four Temperaments, an utterly perfect work to Hindemith. On the light side, the Gershwin delight Who Cares? returns, with its fluffy Hershey Kay orchestrations. It is the ballet equivalent of bubble bath, and I can hardly wait to jump in. (Through March 1 at Lincoln Center; 212-870-5570 or 212-307-4100.) --N.D. Two Plays That Pack a Punch This month American Repertory Theatre (617-547-8300), in Cambridge, Massachusetts, juggles two ideological wrestling matches--Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (through March 21), directed by Andrei Serban, featuring the wild and wooing Petruchio in one corner and a very un-bonny Kate in the other; and Brecht's parable about American capitalism, In the Jungle of Cities (through March 14), staged by Robert Woodruff, in which Garga and Schlink square off after the playwright's prologue admonishing audiences, "Don't worry your heads about the motives for the fight, keep your minds on the stakes." Serban's staging of Twelfth Night Brecht, who once suggested that theater should have the atmosphere of a boxing match, where audiences can puff cigars, won't get it at the smoke-free Loeb Drama Center. But he'd be pleased by the artistic director Robert Brustein's choice of directors. Serban and Woodruff, the Don Kings of American experimental directing, both deliver sharp jabs and roundhouse rights to encrusted classics. ART audiences know Serban for his revivals of the fairy tale The King Stag, with masks, puppets, and costumes by Julie Taymor. Woodruff once staged The Comedy of Errors as a circus featuring the Flying Karamazovs, drag queens, and clowns. At both these current shows expect an early knockout. --J.I. Nancy Dalva is the author of Dance Ink: Photographs. John Istel is a senior editor at Stagebill. Go to ... Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.