Theater Review: Crocodile Fever at Irish Classical Theatre Company

By Anthony Chase

The Irish Classical Theatre Company’s production of Meghan Tyler’s Crocodile Fever detonates on the Buffalo stage with a ferocity and wit that few plays dare. Director Keelie A. Sheridan, whose programming is steadily nudging the company beyond the well-trodden paths of Irish drama, here delivers a work that feels both defiantly of the moment and rooted in tradition.

Set in a rural Northern Irish kitchen during the Troubles, Crocodile Fever is, on its surface, a tale of two estranged sisters, Alannah and Fianna Devlin, reunited under the oppressive shadow of their abusive, now-paralyzed father. But Tyler’s play is less a family drama than a riotous, blood-soaked exorcism, where the ghosts of history and the grotesqueries of patriarchy are given monstrous, even mythic, form.

The action begins with Alannah, the dutiful daughter, tending obsessively to her spotless kitchen and to the needs of her tyrannical father. When Fianna, the rebellious younger sister recently released from prison, crashes back into the family home, the reunion is anything but sentimental. Old wounds quickly resurface: Fianna served time for a fire that killed their mother. As the sisters circle each other, their shared trauma and mutual resentment boil over. The play’s second half spirals into surreal horror and dark comedy, with the sisters confronting both the literal and symbolic monsters that have haunted their lives.

Cassie Cameron and Anna Krempholtz are superbly matched as the contrasting sisters: Cameron’s Alannah, brittle and precise, clings to domestic rituals as if cleanliness could scrub away the past; Krempholtz’s Fianna, all swagger and volatility, storms the kitchen with the energy of a punk Joan of Arc. Their contrasting vocal cadences serve to heighten the tension, as does their impressively athletic physicality. Yet both are propelled by the same desperate urge to break the cycle of violence that has defined their lives. Their performances are as funny as they are harrowing, and the chemistry between them is the engine of the production.

Christopher Guilmet and Jake Hayes also deserve mention for their capable turns as the sisters’ domineering father and the British soldier, respectively.

Sheridan’s direction leans into the play’s expressionistic extremes without ever losing sight of its emotional core. The design team meets the challenge with relish: Matthew DeVita’s lighting flickers between the naturalistic and the nightmarish; Mason Beggs’s sound design conjures both the distant threat of helicopters and the intimate terrors of memory. Diane Almeter Jones’s props conjure both mundane reality and horror; her frightfully convincing pools of blood are not for the squeamish. J Marc Quattlebaum’s crocodile puppet, a grotesque and oddly charismatic presence, literalizes the play’s central metaphor: the monstrous legacy of abuse that haunts the Devlin family.

Primo Thomas’s set and E.L. Hohn’s costumes, hair, and make-up ground the production in a reality that is always ready to tip, tauntingly, into the surreal. The ample violence of the piece is fabulously staged by Adriano Gatto, whose fight direction ensures every eruption of chaos lands with visceral clarity.

Sheridan has expertly staged the play in the circular space of the Andrews Theatre, making full use of the intimacy and immediacy that theatre-in-the-round provides. With just three rows of seats encircling the stage, every seat is in close proximity to the action, though vantage points do vary. Audience members seated on the south side should know they will be facing the back of the Devlin kitchen; while these seats are certainly serviceable, those on the other sides (I was very happy on the east side) offer a more direct view of the play’s most dynamic and outrageous moments.

This production also stands out for the sheer abundance of trigger warnings -- more than I ever recall having encountered and covering everything from the play’s depictions of abuse, trauma, graphic violence, revenge, strong language, gore, war, haze, flashing light, and loud sounds. Amusingly, some warnings are even embedded in the script itself: Alannah’s enthusiasm for the 1970s horror classic Carrie is both a nod to the play’s taste for the macabre and a wry signal to the audience that there will be blood! As Anton Chekhov advised us long ago, a chain saw appearing in Act One, will undoubtedly be fired up in Act Two.

The audience, for their part, was by turns engaged empathetically and giddily startled by the horror, given the play’s wild tonal shifts and graphic violence, this is a delightful bit of theatrical whiplash. Needless to say, I did not observe a single person dozing off.

What makes Crocodile Fever so bracing (and so relevant to an American audience right now) is its refusal to sentimentalize violence or offer easy redemption. Tyler’s script, by turns hilarious and horrifying, draws on a tradition of Irish absurdism that stretches from Beckett’s existential vaudeville to such savage farces as Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, where the stage erupts in a comic bloodbath of dismemberment and cat killing (there’s a prop challenge for you, Diane!), and A Behanding in Spokane, which features severed hands hurled about in a macabre pillow fight, both played for shock and laughs. Like those plays, Crocodile Fever uses the tools of the grotesque and the absurd to interrogate not just the legacy of political violence, but the everyday brutality that festers in private life.

But Tyler also reaches further back, tapping into the mythic symbolism that has long animated Irish drama -- from the supernatural visitations of Yeats and Lady Gregory to the spectral mothers and monstrous fathers of Marina Carr. Here, the crocodile is not just a puppet, but a living emblem of the cycles of harm that the sisters must confront and, ultimately, destroy.

This is not a play that reassures; it unsettles, provokes, and, in its final moments, offers a harsh, hard-won vision of liberation. Sheridan and her team have delivered a production that is as artful as it is audacious, as fun as it is unsettling -- a testament to the enduring, evolving power of Irish drama to illuminate the darkness and, just possibly, to burn it all down.

The programming at ICTC has previously explored these parallel impulses in the work of Joe Orton and Harold Pinter, whose plays share with Tyler’s a fascination for the breakdown of language, the arbitrariness of violence, and the dark comedy of survival. With Crocodile Fever, Sheridan takes the company on a bold leap into the contemporary, offering Buffalo audiences a play that is as much about the monsters within as the monsters without. It’s a marvelously wild ride!

Crocodile Fever continues through June 15th.

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