Lipstick On the Host

The characters in Aidan Mathew's Ireland are marvelously off-center, charming, poignant. A twelve-year-old boy visits the land of the Holocaust because he wants to be a Jew when he grows up. An asthmatic, doddering priest kills the mice in his room with a tennis racket, and in church he baptizes Tortoise the Tortoise for a little girl. A middle-aged schoolmarm is on about sex again ("weird stuff") with her fifth-graders - last time, it was topless dancing in a Weimar nightclub - before she finally falls in love with a dashing gynecologist. And a sheep philosophizes on the condition of sheep (goats are part of some other plan).