The Beauty Queen of Leenane
Martin McDonagh's 1995 thriller, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, isn't my favorite of his plays. The tale of a middle-aged virgin stuck nursing her nasty mother in an Irish backwater, it's a guileless piece about guileful people, an hermetically sealed tour of the way we torture ourselves and one another. Maureen (Ferrell Marshall) entices a boyfriend (Alex Egan) contrary to the wishes of her mother Mag (Judy Nazemetz); terrified of - and abominably fortified against - abandonment, Mag plots to end the romance. With a superlative cast and a vigilant director, even a play that telegraphs its itinerary can compel an audience forward. The new staging by The Production Company is worth seeing for the performances and for other reasons, but it does not entirely hide the faults nor fulfill the promise of the writing.
August Viverito designs this play with spartan efficiency, allowing the players to tell the story under his laissez-faire direction. This approach can succeed when you've got an actor-proof play, and when all your actors are perfectly attuned to the piece's inherent rhythms. Neither of those functions is in place here. The writing, while famously lyrical and carefully plotted, is too pat and unsurprising for the director not to engineer his own dramatic trickery; when characters do in the second act just what they threaten in the first, it's up to someone to rig some stunts. Viverito does well to allow the story its own head early on, but later come scenes that demand a great deal of tact from him and from the actors if they are to produce the suspense requisite in the script. One such moment, when a village idiot (Rob Herring) threatens to entrust an all-important message to the wrongest possible party, is equally the director's problem and the actor's. McDonagh provides the stock situation, straight out of 19th century melodrama, and the potential responses of stagecraft are equally venerable. But instead of simply investing in the given circumstance, Herring plays his role as if for the hard of hearing, huffing and puffing and rolling his eyes until I thought he might faint; his broad indicating dissipates necessary tension from the scene, and his director has not given him enough to do to make up for it. What should be an impetus toward crisis stops the emotional momentum of the show.
But again, Viverito's nonintervention policy works much of the time, especially when Judy Nazemetz is onstage. Her portrayal of a meddlesome old tyrant rides the edge of camp while remaining fully grounded in truth, a totally successful characterization that ranks with the best work I've seen in Los Angeles. And when Egan and Marshall woo, the dismal kitchen set glows with rosy optimism. No doubt, this production finds the heartbeat of the play; it just doesn't really quicken it.
To read a more spoiler-driven discussion of this play in my weekly column, please go to:
losangeles.bitter-lemons.com/2012/01/17/revelation-cloaked
January 13 through February 18, 2012
Tickets: www.TheProdCo.com