Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy makes
murder a profession, morality a technicality,
and laughter increasingly uncomfortable

Noah Wagner (HARRY) Amanda Karr (ALICE)

Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen opens with a man about to be hanged and everyone fussing over procedure. It is 1963. James Hennessy insists the police have the wrong man. His executioner, Harry Wade, is unmoved. Harry thinks of himself as a tradesman doing an unpleasant job properly.

Two years on, Britain is giving up hanging and Harry keeps a pub in Oldham. His new captives are his wife Alice, his awkward teenage daughter Shirley, and a bar full of regulars who look at him the way men look at a retired footballer. He soaks it up.

Dina Hagler (SHIRLEY), Amanda Karr (ALICE)

Then Peter Mooney comes in, young and southern and faintly insolent, odd enough to make the room uneasy. His first conversation with Shirley starts as banter and turns wrong by degrees. Saying more would spoil it. The play begins as period comedy, wanders into domestic farce, and, at Long Beach Playhouse, becomes a thriller almost before anyone notices.

Britain hanged people for centuries, in public until 1868. The last executions came on August 13, 1964, when Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were hanged simultaneously at separate prisons for the murder of John West. Parliament suspended the death penalty for murder in Great Britain in November 1965 and made abolition permanent in 1969. The state had lent Harry its authority. Now he pours pints.

James Rice (ARTHUR), Ari Hagler (CHARLIE), Kolby King (CLEGG), Noah Wagner (HARRY), Amanda Karr (ALICE), Allen Sewell (INSPECTOR FRY), Floyd Harden (BILL)

Harry has made a craft of execution, with its standards, technique, and even professional rivalries. Over all of it hangs Albert Pierrepoint, the “No. 1 executioner.” McDonagh sees the comedy in men discussing killing like plumbers comparing credentials. Then you notice what you are laughing at.

This is familiar McDonagh ground, from The Beauty Queen of Leenane to In Bruges: cruel jokes, lonely people, and characters who turn dangerous mid-sentence.

Hangmen belongs in a small room, and the Long Beach Playhouse Studio Theatre is one. The regulars look permanently installed, like furniture nobody remembers buying. At that distance, McDonagh’s pauses and glances count for more. Mooney needs no thunder. The closer you sit, the harder his silences become to bear.

Dina Hagler (SHIRLEY), Trevor Hart (MOONEY)

Director Carl DaSilva keeps the regulars from sliding into sitcom eccentricity without killing the laughs.

The realistic pub set is suitably cramped. Everyone appears trapped within touching distance of everyone else. The costumes look authentic to both period and place. Muted colors across the set, clothing, and lighting recall the black-and-white British films of the 1960s. The Northern English accents are on point. The effect suits a play in which the past never feels entirely past.

Amanda Karr, Noah Wagner, and Trevor Hart

Harry believes in Harry, which rules out playing him as a monster. His vanity is enormous, as is his certainty that the work was honorable. Noah Wagner plays that belief without apology. Amanda Kerr steals scenes as Alice, the one person in the pub who sees her husband’s absurdity plainly. Dina Hagler’s Shirley lives somewhere else entirely, and her loneliness charges her early scenes with Mooney. Trevor Hart arrives as Mooney with little information and a great deal of nerve. He never lets the audience settle on a verdict.

That doubt reaches back to Hennessy. Harry does what the court orders, and the court convicted the man, so guilt is someone else’s business. It is a neat circle. It holds until somebody asks whether the man at the end of the rope was innocent.

Hangmen is very funny and sometimes appalling, often in the same line. Harry and his regulars never think of themselves as villains. For much of the evening, neither do we. Long Beach Playhouse makes that moral trap feel close, funny, and finally inescapable.

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photos by Michael Hardy

Hangmen
Long Beach Playhouse
Studio Theatre, Long Beach Playhouse, 5021 E. Anaheim St. in Long Beach
Fri–Sat at 8; Sun at 2
ends on September 26, 2026
for tickets ($20–$32), call 562.494.1014 or visit Long Beach Playhouse

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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