Read Reviews of the Production

For at least 15 years, Iron Age Theatre has been a blood-and-guts company fighting to stage good stories that they find entertaining, important and thought-provoking. A Skull in Connemara may be the company's best work yet, and it certainly fits its blood-and-guts reputation. This production of the second play in Martin McDonough's trilogy about life in a village in the west of Ireland has strong, consistent, even performances and a sense of great enjoyment staging this violent, profane, brutal, funny and gentle work.
Martin McDonough has gathered one of the most acclaimed reputations in theater in the last 20 years for his hand-ful of bizarre, funny, and gory plays. Audiences respond with enthusiasm, accepting the mayhem, violence, innocence, drinking, swearing, and pop culture references as the outlandish parody they are. Think of McDonough as The Stooges doing Macbeth, only their violence now comes complete with gore.
Iron Age is a company that likes to work with actors in multiple plays. Weick has appeared in Terra Nova, Of Mice and Men, and recently in Boys in Autumn, and has shown ability, character and growth in each role. His Mick is his strongest work yet with Iron Age.
Susan Giddings is working for the first time with Iron Age Theatre. She is a gift to this production. Her Maryjohnny is note perfect. Irish audience members will recognize her as an aunt, a mother, a neighbor or someone in their Irish clan with her gleefully evil intent wrapped in the seemingly sweet reminders of duty, God and family. Altman plays Mairtin appropriately as a good-natured, mulishly brutal boy of the type most commonly recognized as a soccer thug. Zanders' Thomas is a difficult role because it calls for him to think of himself as clever while at the same time demonstrating he is unbelievably stupid. It's hard to imagine successfully selling this character to any audience. Directors John Doyle and Randall Wise capture a wonderful sense of Stooges-like violence and fun in this production. Once again, as on many past occasions, the set designed and created by Kate McLenigan and built by Wise is superior work - beautiful, telling and lovingly detailed.
For a laugh, a good evening of new theater, and a strange sense you've met the people in the story, try A Skull in Connemara. It's well worth the trip.
Jim McCaffrey The Evening Bulletin

Directors Randall Wise and John Doyle relish the bickering, bile and blood that make McDonagh's plays like car wrecks, revolting yet riveting. Skull introduces gravedigger Mick Dowd (Bob Weick), who works at night removing old bones from his parish cemetery to clear space for new corpses. His labors lead to his late wife's remains.
Iron Age always creates beautifully ambitious sets in their small Centre Theatre, and Wise and Doyle's creation for Skull is one of their best, featuring a ghoulishly realistic cemetery built so that Mick and his assistant Mairtin (Thomas' brother, played by Adam Altman) can actually dig up bones. Though only one scene occurs in the graveyard, its hulking presence haunts the action.
Skull vivisects village life, where rumor and rancor guide people more than the laws of man or the church, and familial relationships harbor both deep devotion and unfettered rage—all fueled by alcohol. Wise and Doyle balance the play's broad humor and explicit violence well: Weick's tortured Mick smolders, Altman's Mairtin is an impetuous fool, Zanders' Thomas brims with desperate self-importance and Susan Giddings' MaryJohnny, just a gossiping bingo cheat at first, reveals unexpected depth. We laugh along with Mick and Mairtin as they drunkenly smash skulls with mallets, knowing that at any moment they'll turn their primitive hammers on each other.
McDonagh's haunting talent for creating morally ambiguous characters—revealing us as children in adults' bodies, endearing yet dangerous—shines in A Skull in Connemara.
Mark Cofta - The City Paper

If you don't already know who Martin McDonagh is, you soon will. The Atlantic Theater Company's heart-pounding production of McDonagh's sinfully entertaining play The Lieutenant of Inishmore is opening on Broadway next week. But you don't have to make the trip to N.Y.C. to catch the red-hot playwright. In Norristown the Iron Age Theatre is presenting the Philadelphia-area premiere of McDonagh's A Skull in Connemara. Like most of McDonagh's plays, Skull is set in a tiny rural town in Ireland. It's there that Mick Dowd (Bob Weick), the village gravedigger, is about to get on with the task of transferring the old bones from the town graveyard to make room for new arrivals. Among the bones cited for removal are those of Mick's wife, whose death seven years earlier was either a terrible accident or a murder. It's a grisly mystery, and although the Iron Age production (with the exception of a delightful performance by Susan Giddings) only partially realizes McDonagh's macabre universe of tortured misfits, Skull is still a fun ride.
J. Cooper Robb - Philadelphia Weekly