The Beauty Queen of Leenane

In Martin McDonagh’s first play, hailed on both sides of the Atlantic over a decade ago, you don’t see the playwright who so complexly layered plot and theme in 2003’s The Pillowman. But you do see how McDonagh became that playwright. If, in Pillowman, the power of storytelling is the subject, here young McDonagh is figuring that power out; instead of fearing theatrical conventions (the hang-up of young playwrights), he’s thinking through them. Queen’s characters, for instance, pursue neatly opposed desires: In an Irish village, spinster Maureen wants to be rid of her 70-year-old mom, the nagging Mag, and thinks laborer Pato might be her getaway; Mag wants to keep Maureen at her beck and call. McDonagh even employs the age-old device of the comic messenger, whose failure to deliver a letter ends disastrously. More than a well-spun yarn, however, Queen is a glimpse into the petty cruelties of domestic life, the meanness inflicted on those in closest, daily proximity. Its grisly outcome is the end result of desperate, dead-end lives shackled together.

Director Patinkin approaches Queen not as Grand Guignol but kitchen sink, eliciting our care but also curbing any underlying menace (McDonagh would keep those tones in balance). Thebus and Newton render mom and daughter, respectively, recognizable enough that we lend them our sympathy yet awful enough that, once given, that sympathy travels into some nasty corners. Thebus’s clenched-mouth, vacant-eyed Mag makes us feel she deserves whatever’s coming to her, and sorry once she gets it.—Novid Parsi