'Beauty Queen of Leenane': in-your-face theatre
Playwright Martin McDonagh burst onto the theatrical scene in the 1990s like a pop-star or a new brand of soda pop. He was a 20-something phenomenon with a reputation for killer comedy.
The English-born son of an Irish construction worker and a cleaning lady, McDonagh had no formal training. He dropped out of school at 16, was a bag-boy in a London supermarket, and a part-time civil servant.
Mostly, he watched the telly and went on the dole.
But, over nine months in 1994, he wrote seven plays set in the West of Ireland county where his father grew up and where the family went on summer vacations.
The first play to be produced, "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," opened at the Druid Theatre, in Galway, Ireland, in 1996.
"Beauty Queen" Kim Crow and Jess Peterson in the play, "The Beauty Queen of Leenane."
By 1998, it was a hit in London and on Broadway, where it won four Tony awards.
His career played out like a chase scene in a Hollywood blockbuster. Within a few years, this Sex Pistols and Tarantino fan, who had never lived in Ireland, became one of the most successful Irish playwrights alive.
At 26, he had four different plays running simultaneously in London. He wrote and directed the short film "Six Shooter" in 2005, which won an Academy Award and the full-length feature film "In Bruges" he wrote was also nominated last year.
"The Beauty Queen of Leenane," brought to town by the Banyan Theatre at Asolo/FSU’s Performing Arts Center, is a mix of taut melodrama and black humor.
Its title character is 40-year-old Maureen (Jessica K. Peterson). Never married, she lives in a cottage in the wild and impoverished Connemara with her 70-year-old mother, Mag (Kim Crow), with whom she is locked into a relationship of mutual hatred and resentment.
The plot centers around Maureen’s desire to leave Ireland for America with her suitor, a construction worker her age named Pato (Derry Woodhouse). Her mother manages to thwart the plan, and Maureen retaliates with horrific consequences.
McDonagh is seen as an innovator of a new genre that has become known as "in-your-face" theatre, whose function is to present the audience with shocking and confrontational material. One of his works was even banned from production during Anglo-Irish peace talks of the recent past.
Here, he perfected the form from the onset, with this, his first produced play. Howls of laughter and gasps of horror are served up in equal measure.
Although the family themes are universal, the mythical Ireland of Syne and "The Quiet Man," and the politics of rousing rebel songs are especially skewered in McDonagh’s works.
Violence, profanity and brutality are common, even though sometimes one finds oneself feeling sympathy toward the most unsympathetic characters.
Banyan’s Director Gil Lazier was blessed with a skilled cast, half of which come by it naturally, as native Irishmen. The two Dooley boys, young stay-at-home Ray (Gordon Myles Woods) and Pato, who works on a construction site in Britain, are skillfully and authentically drawn, right down to their Wellies, and Pato’s beautifully comic monologue at the beginning of Act II is one of its highlights.
Likewise, Peterson (who was excellent in last season’s "Moon for the Misbegotten") masters both the accent and pent-up frustation of a 40-year-old virgin locked in mortal combat with her manipulating mammy.
Crow, as the harpy Mag, has scenes of sly humor and vicious needling, although she has the weakest grip on the vernacular.
One quibble with Jeffrey Dean’s set. Anyone who has ever been in an Irish cottage (and I say this as a 10-year-resident of a "tigeen" in Kildare) know that the overwhelming effect is one of claustrophobia from the low ceilings and thick stone walls. Here the open top adds a feeling of spaciousness that is contrary to the mood.
Never mind. The squeamish should stay home. Everybody else should see this fine play. And leaving a donation to keep the Banyan running through the season wouldn’t be a bad idea.