The Monkey's Paw

The dysfunctional relationship that playwright-director-actor Kevin Crowley conjures up in his odd, intense but strangely frigid play, The Monkey’s Paw, would sail off the charts in any clinical psych textbook. Mike, Tish and a son who’s seen only as an infant doll qualify as a family only in a names-on-a-contract, legal sense.

They are married. They did produce the child. But they're monumentally incapable of creating or inhabiting a familial relationship. Hell, he’s monumentally unsuited to any kind of nurturing connection. She might have loved him at the beginning. Perhaps was only intrigued by him. From the get-go his treatment of her is one offhand horror after another — causing one to wonder why she doesn’t reach for a gun and murder the bastard instead of reaching for a gin bottle.

The two characters are vividly focused both in Crowley’s occasionally acidly funny script and in the crisp performances they’re being given, but they remain stubbornly remote. And for all that the technical support, including original video, is notches above the typical Fringe Festival production, watching the 65 time-warped minutes of The Monkey’s Paw remains unsettling, an invigorating but ultimately unsatisfying experience.

As a child Mike (Crowley) was neglected and thoroughly abused with disinterest by his father. As an adult he was forced into the family’s janitorial business. He and Tish (Angela Zito) meet, flirt, bond, wed and have a son without exhibiting any particular affection for each other.

Mike is pathologically incapable of caring for, of even touching, the boy. He vomits at the sight of a soiled diaper. He is both revolted and sent into a jealous snit by the sight of the child nursing at Tish’s breast. He works at not remembering the kid’s name. He binds the year-old into his high chair and feeds him non-alcoholic beer.

Later on he takes his now 8-year-old son on a camping trip and casually abandons him in the wild. Asked by a frantic Tish where the boy is, Mike says — as he’s pouring himself a drink — that he wandered off and Mike did look around for him for an hour or so but then came on home.

In a pre-Fringe interview, Crowley said the piece is about “the fear of fatherhood.” Yep. And then some.

During the camping trip Mike lounges by a campfire and relates to his son the story told in W. W. Jacobs’ 1902 short story. Couple with son who works in a factory are given the magic paw by a drunken sailor. It grants three wishes, he says. Wish One: The wife asks for wealth. An official from their son’s place of employment arrives with the news that the young man was killed in a factory accident. He hands them a compensatory $1,000. Chagrined and grieving, the woman uses Wish Two to beg for her son’s return and soon the mangled body comes stumping up the lane toward the house. Barely in time the husband finds the paw and uses Wish Three to send the son out of their lives and back to his grave.

Crowley’s Monkey’s Paw spins its own dark hallucinations around that tale. Grade: B

— Tom McElfresh