I recently saw a provocative and funny Broadway play about an Irish terrorist and his family, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, by a British dramatist named Martin McDonagh.

The hype about this play, which got rave reviews but no Tony Awards in last night’s ceremony, is that it’s the most violent thing to hit midtown Manhattan since Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen checked into the Chelsea Hotel. It’s definitely got a harder-hitting attitude than most Broadway shows, which some people think is great while others fear the Quentin Tarantino-ization of Broadway.

At the beginning of the evening I did not have a strong position on this matter, and I entered the theater ready to be swayed one way or the other.

The lights fall, the audience ruffles its jewelry, and the spotlight shines on two very scared Irish men, a father and a son. The son seems to have just smashed into the family’s beloved cat, Wee Thomas, with his bicycle. The cat is dead, and this is bad news because the family’s eldest son is a famous (and famously deranged) terrorist who loves the cat more than anybody else, and will surely kill his brother for killing his cat.

As James Kirkwood once proved in a novel called P. S. Your Cat Is Dead, an expired feline is sometimes all the material required for an entertaining evening. The father and son desperately try to scheme a way out of their impending doom as the terrorist returns home, having interrupted an important act of torture (which is apparently his day job) to rush back as soon as he’d heard his cat was in trouble.

We soon learn that this terrorist exists without a coherent cause. He has splintered off from his I.R.A. splinter group, and is now left in a ragtag gathering of tired friends who mouth bored cliches about Irish freedom. He’s in love with guns, though, and so is a neighborhood girl who adores him and has a habit of shooting the eyes out of cows. The strange thing about all of these people is that they seem addicted to violence the way people can be addicted to television or junk food. It’s all anybody talks about in Inishmore, the only language anybody understands.

More gun-toting people show up on stage, and most of them end up killing the rest of them, after which the stage of the Lyceum theater turns into the grisliest tableau I have ever seen on a Broadway stage, featuring enough fake-blood and bleeding limbs to power a Korn video.

Let’s just say that the stage crew must have a hell of a clean-up job every night. The play starts moving fast as it moves towards the end; secrets are revealed, more cats are killed, more people are killed, and we discover which character will truly emerge as the Lieutenant of Inishmore by the end (hint: it’s not the tough guy).

The play does suggest Tarantino (which is not, in my opinion, a bad thing), but it also suggests Harold Pinter and David Mamet, and I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind watching a human body get jointed with saws and drills while enjoying a relaxing evening of theater. In other words, it’s a good play but it’s not a date play (and I think I personally lucked out that my girlfriend was busy that night).

More than any work of drama, though, what this play suggests is the newspaper I’m going to read tomorrow morning. As shockingly violent as this play is, it’s really only just violent enough, just cartoonish enough, just Absurdist enough to equal the real crap that’s going on around the world today. Aggresion speaks. From Ireland to Israel to Palestine to Iraq to Iran to Chechnya to Moscow to Darfur to Texas, the warlords shout their slogans and hold us all at gunpoint, and we cower in fear instead of standing up and fighting back. The characters in this play are almost ridiculous enough to be real.

If you’re interested in catching The Lieutenant of Inishmore the next time you’re in New York City, the theater is offering a discount code to readers of LitKicks: just go to www.broadwayoffers.com and enter code INHDS28, call the box office via the website above, or show up in person with the code at the Lyceum Theatre in Manhattan.