Washington Post - Somewhat Recommended
"...No doubt for unavoidable budgetary reasons, the production's key gore effect looks ridiculously phony. Such flaws don't wholly impede McDonagh's deadpan wit and slickly plotted sensationalism: The Keegan staging occasionally keeps you on tenterhooks, and it's often funny. But all in all, the production doesn't put the best face - or, perhaps we should say, hand - on the play."
DC Theater Arts - Highly Recommended
"...A Behanding in Spokane is an unexpected guilty pleasure. Unexpected, because the play is promoted as a macabre tale full of grisly surprises. Although there are a plethora of blood-soaked amputated hands, this production never really descends into the realm of darkness and horror I expected. Guilty, because the story doesn't give us much in the way of meaning or plausibility. But ultimately, pleasure, because we do get exceptional performances that deliver a slightly creepy yet hilarious tale of a man looking for his hand that was stolen by hillbillies 27 years earlier. This is a fun, escapist evening of theater."
Washington Examiner - Recommended
"...The best monologue is given to Mervyn, who tells the audience of his desire to be brave, to be heroic, despite the fact that he comes on like the frail Caspar Milquetoast. Smith's portrayal of the pacific, loony clerk is delightful, especially when, at the last minute, he achieves his goal and becomes the hero of this raunchy, goofy expression of tension and small-time brinkmanship."
DCist - Recommended
"...This isn't McDonagh at his best, but it's still entertaining enough when he sticks to what he's good at-namely, anything but "talking in a nuanced way about race in America.""
Washington City Paper - Somewhat Recommended
"...Shuffling through these three-year-old memories on the occasion of the Keegan Theatre's middling local premiere of Behanding, I think I probably gave that Broadway production too much credit. Whether the play is racist or not (the New Yorker's Hilton Als averred it was), it clearly has nothing of interest to say on the subject of bigotry. Much more importantly, it just isn't very good."
Washingtonian - Recommended
"...What Behanding really has going for it is its urgent absurdity. This is a story dropping four people into an increasingly off-the-wall (and increasingly perilous) situation and observing the consequences. What happens, as it turns out, offers an amusing tangle of motives and personalities and an oddly imaginative plot line you'll have trouble explaining to your friends but will be able to follow . . . mostly. In any case, hats off for originality-or maybe in this case, hands."
ShowBizRadio - Highly Recommended
"...Playwright Martin McDonagh succeeds in writing, and the actors in Keegan Theatre's cast succeed in delivering, wonderfully fluent and intelligently-written lines for the four characters in A Behanding in Spokane, not one of whom is even remotely a bright bulb. Filled with extended n-word and mf-word riffs worthy of a late-night standup routine, the play gleefully uses its absurdist premise to take on the craziness of racial and gender relations. "Uproariously funny" aptly describes the result; the audience was, indeed, in an uproar of laughter from start to finish."
MD Theatre Guide - Recommended
"...Director Collin Smith and his production team have offered us a relatively realistic vision. Along with his set, we have costumes (Kelly Peacock) and lighting (Megan Thrift) and sound (Tony Angelini) that reinforce the idea that we are in lower class America. Smith's direction allows the script's funny moments to shine, and the ensemble does a reasonable job of portraying them, but the script and its flaws demand more: the script's situation demands an even deeper depth of the depravity."
DCTheatreScene - Highly Recommended
A one-handed man on a cross-country odyssey to find his missing hand, waits in a squalid hotel room for two equally squalid visitors. Then, the story turns odd. Not to mention violent, shocking, and most of all, darkly comic in Irish playwright Martin McDonough’s latest work, A Behanding in Spokane, now making its area premiere in an outstanding production by Keegan Theatre.