The Beauty Queen of Leenane
But in Martin McDonagh’s fine The Beauty Queen of Leenane–receiving its Chicago premiere in a virtually flawless production at Steppenwolf directed by Randall Arney–the object in question is merely an envelope containing a few pages of text. We know that if McDonagh’s troubled antiheroine, Maureen Folan, gets the letter, she’ll most likely move away from her drab life in the small town of Leenane to join her beloved Pato, the letter’s author, in America. But if Maureen’s mother, the miserable hypochondriac Mag (Aideen O’Kelly), gets the letter, she will surely destroy it and deny its existence, ensuring that her daughter will care for her till her death.
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There the letter sits, propped on a table in Mag’s dismal kitchen as she waits for Pato’s brother, Ray, to depart so that she can chuck it into the fire. And the audience waits with unbearable impatience for Maureen to return home and reverse the inevitable downward course of her life. The tension is as nerve-racking as if the letter contained a bomb–and in effect it does, for it has the power to tear asunder the fates of all concerned. But in a play as bleak and fatalistic as this one, waiting for the right person to get the letter is like waiting for Oedipus to tell his mother “Not tonight, dear–I have a headache.”
Into Maureen’s joyless existence wanders one Pato Dooley, a naive man romantic enough to fall in love with Maureen on the night before he is to return to London and foolish enough to believe her when she tells him that the psychosis for which she was hospitalized was only an isolated incident and that the scars on her mother’s body are the result of self-inflicted wounds. Played with an endearing humility and puppyish eagerness to please by the estimable Rick Snyder, Pato Dooley is the closest thing to a knight in shining armor this story has. The scenes between him and Maureen when they twirl off to bed and the next morning when they wake up are the most charming the play has to offer. McDonagh is a solid writer throughout, but here his smart dialogue and vivid characterizations take on the sparkle of hope. It comes with an equal dose of melancholy, however, for McDonagh is the Isaac Newton of playwrights: for every action in his play, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The greater the optimism generated at the end of the first act, the greater the price will be at the end of the second.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Brosilow.
