Photo Flash: The Taper Presents THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE

"The Lieutenant of Inishmore," the strikingly original black comedy by Academy Award-winning, Olivier Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated Martin McDonagh, opens at the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum at the Los Angeles Music Center on Sunday, July 11 at 7 p.m. Previews are underway and performances continue through August 8, 2010.

Directed by Tony Award-nominee Wilson Milam, the cast features (in alphabetical order) Ian Alda, Andrew Connolly, Coby Getzug, Seán G. Griffin, Kevin Kearns, Zoe Perry, Chris Pine and Brett Ryback.

The scenic designer is Laura Fine Hawkes, the costume designer is Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, the lighting designer is Brian Gale and the sound designer is Cricket S. Myers. Casting is by Erika Sellin and the production stage manager is David S. Franklin.

"The Lieutenant of Inishmore" is a blistering, graphic satire on violence set in 1993 on the rocky island of Inishmore. Padraic (Chris Pine), a hard-boiled terrorist, has been away in Northern Ireland with his busy schedule of torture and assorted nationalist mayhem, but he is lured home to Inishmore by the news that his beloved cat, Wee Thomas, is doing poorly. When Padraic finds out Wee Thomas has been murdered, he initiates a cycle of revenge-killing that threatens everyone in his path, except perhaps the love-struck Mairead (Zoe Perry), a 16-year-old terrorist groupie with a BB gun.

When "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" was presented in 2006 at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, Ben Brantley of The New York Times said that the play is ". . . brazenly and unapologetically a farce, but it is also a severely moral play, translating into dizzy absurdism the self-perpetuating spirals of political violence that now occur throughout the world . . . [it is] directed with a steady gaze and acute theatrical instinct by Wilson Milam." Michael Billington of The Guardian remarked of the earlier London production, ". . . a boldly brilliant play about the way rigid adherence to a cause destroys a sense of proportion . . . Like all first-rate satire, the play attacks excess and endorses reason."

Tickets for "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" are available by calling CTG Audience Services at (213) 628-2772 or online at www.CenterTheatreGroup.org or in person at the CTG box office located at the Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center.