Martin McDonagh Tells How He Executed Broadway’s Most Chilling Comedy In ‘Hangmen’: Deadline’s Tony Watch Q&A
In one of this Broadway season’s most startling on-stage moments, Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen takes a swift and no-turning back move, a Psycho-like turn shortly after the start of the play that re-directs everything. A character we might have initially believed to be the center of the story is done away with, dispatched by one the executioners who give Hangmen its title. Only slightly less startling: That doomed character will, in fact, be the story’s center, both by his subsequent absence and by the questions left hanging with him: Was he guilty of the murder that brought him to the gallows? And does murder ever justify murder?