From left: Chase Burnett, Maureen W. McDonald and Brenda Galgan, Photo by Tom Ortiz.

  

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

by Martin McDonagh

Presented by ICT Theatre on the Edge

August 27 - September 4

at ICT Rudy Seppy Rehearsal Studio
2333 W. Rochelle Road
Irving, TX 75062
972-594-6104

$8 at door

8pm Friday & Saturday

In a sense, the way in which ICT Theatre On the Edge stages Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane is really quite perfect, couching unsettling and shocking black comedy amidst a rather mundane story.

ICT Mainstage, like so many theaters, typically produces safer work meant to play to and essentially coddle their willing audience. And that’s fine. You have to do what sells. What ICT does differently than other theaters, though, is a limited series called ICT Theatre On the Edge. Housed on the end of a rundown shopping center and resembling a re-purposed warehouse on the inside, ICT has created a space where it can give the audience a little jolt, and push boundaries by producing lesser known, more risqué works.

Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman,the movieIn Bruges), who won an Academy Award for his live action short film, Six Shooter, is nothing if not risqué. Typically residing in the murky waters of dark comedy, McDonagh’s signature style is to place extraordinary and often shocking moments within a story that might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill exploration of character and relationships.

McDonagh’s first published work, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, serves as an early indicator of the development of an uncanny serio-comic noir style that is so eerily similar to other works, and yet so strange and different.

The title character of the play is Maureen Folan (Maureen W. McDonald), a spinster who lives with and takes care of her domineering, elderly mother, Mag Folan (Brenda Galgan). Maureen is unhappy in life, blaming her mother for the bulk of her troubles. In return, Mag fiercely protects―or confines―Maureen from the outside world, exaggerating her various ailments to keep her daughter beholden.

However, Maureen’s world gets a jolt when Ray Dooley (Nathan Autrey) stops by the women’s home to convey to them that his brother, Pato Dooley (Chase Burnett) is arriving home from abroad, and Maureen is invited to his homecoming party. Pato and Maureen have a history, and though Mag tries to keep Maureen from finding out about and attending the party, she is unsuccessful. Maureen attends the party and immediately hits it off with Pato.

The following morning Maureen has a minor breakdown in front of Pato, and the story turns from comedic to serious. And while a transition like this might normally cause dissonance in the plot, McDonagh navigates the switch poetically, for it’s at this moment the audience is awoken to the possibility that things may not be as they seem. Here McDonagh plants a seed that will eventually blossom into the shocking climax of the play, and leave the audience reeling.

McDonagh is a master of crafting characters. He creates amazingly, deep, conflicted, fully developed characters and then plays them off of each other as foils. It’s essentially his calling card. Due to this, McDonagh’s work requires solid performances from the actors portraying these characters. Sadly, this is where ICT’s production stumbles.

McDonald is haunting in her portrayal of Maureen Folan. Wearing the exasperation of a loveless and unhappy 40 years like a suit of armor, McDonald does an excellent job of building a shrine to her wrongfully oppressed character and an equally heartbreaking job of tearing it all down. From a technical standpoint, McDonald’s accent was the only one of the four cast members that was consistent and natural, rendering the depiction that much more believable. Simply put, Maureen Folan is the focus of the entire show and McDonald carries the role bravely and with great conviction. Her willingness to take the goodwill garnered from the audience throughout the show, viciously destroy it and still earn their sympathy, is breathtaking.

Galgan’s  portrayal of the overbearing mother is annoying in a good way. Though not as convincingly, Galgan takes the character of Mag Folan in the opposite direction of McDonald’s Maureen. Like two trains passing in the night, Galgan mines a depth in Mag the audience can’t possibly see at the beginning of the show. Like peeling away the layers of a Russian nesting doll, Galgan uses turning points in the story to unveil a new layer to her character, eventually revealing a woman neither as guilty nor blameless as initially suspected. In fact, aside from a somewhat inconsistent accent, Galgan’s performance serves as the second and only other bright spot of the evening. 

Director Scott Nixon made the appropriate choice in deciding to perform the play with Irish accents. In a way, the material, which is littered with Irish terminology and colloquialisms, really only makes sense when performed in the original country Irish dialect. Unfortunately, said accents were incredibly inconsistent. Though Pato Dooley can get away with a mutt accent due to his extensive travels and stays abroad, the other characters are local to Leenane, and would be expected to speak the local dialect with relative ease. As mentioned earlier, McDonald succeeds at this task and Galgan is perfectly adequate.

However, Autrey is a pain to hear speak. Adding to a lack of feel for the material and all the sensitivity of a jackhammer, Autrey’s accent is wild, flowing freely between country Irish, street Irish and everywhere in between. Written as a streetwise hooligan, Autrey’s performance is overly brash and one-dimensional, his accent just being one part of a misguided performance that Nixon should have reined in.

The show-stealer, aside from McDonald, is the incredibly realistic, meticulously created set. Acting also as set and lighting designer, Nixon creates a set that accomplishes McDonagh’s original intention for the audience to feel claustrophobic, as if they are crammed in the tiny apartment with the two women. From a fireplace and stove that glow reddish orange, to a working sink, to haphazardly arranged shelves, Nixon achieves a realism rarely seen in even the best community theaters, let alone a small production like this one.

McDonagh is still a fairly new name to Americans (although not to theater people), but if all is right with the world, that should change. ICT Theatre On the Edge’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane is brave and risky theater. It’s an unconventional, yet entertaining story, and Nixon and his cast have taken up the mantle with impressive gusto and come out the other end battered, but not beaten. That’s good news for theatergoers everywhere.