The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays

This is another of Martin McDonagh's black comedies in his growing canon in the theater of malice and cruelty. He'll soon corner the market on the make `em laugh, then shock `em Irish village genre. Here a mother and daughter exist together in am atmosphere of mutual hatred. The mother Mag is a harpy, a harridan, lazy, spiteful, self-centered, and malicious. Her daughter Maureen, frustrated, unstable and equally malicious, is shackled with her. A local man Pato Dooley, headed for the States, dubs forty-year-old Maureen the beauty queen of Leenane which is their tiny Irish village in Connemara. McDonagh's characters often start with verbal nastiness and graduate to physical cruelty with torture, blood and gore. He's carved out a niche for himself that can cause his audiences to cringe and cower at the lengths he'll go to finish off a character or two. There may be bloody consequences. A McDonagh character must learn to duck to fend off violence and nastiness. Herein beware of hot cooking oil and heavy pokers. His characters often seem like simpletons teetering on the edge of insanity who speak at times in an absurdist nonsensical dialogue. The playwright see saws his audience between seemingly harmless comic absurdity and dark cruelty and sadism. In his theater of savagery human life is negotiable and precarious, and often valueless. He's an original, edgy creative talent who may turn off the queasy and those easily shocked, but he is a force in the theater to be reckoned with. Making his audiences uncomfortable, making them wriggle in their seats may well be his goal. In this play expect less blood and gore than in "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," but don't expect much compassion for the human race. Sickly brilliant, perhaps?

The best way to sum up Martin McDonagh? Quentin Tarantino meets Edward Albee. All three of these plays, also known as the Leenane trilogy, have several things in common: (1) violence (2) black humor (3) grotesque characters and (4) did I mention violence. Like Tarantino, McDonagh's use of violence is mostly humorous. When Maureen smashes her old mothers head with a fire poker, we laugh. We laugh because the poker has been conversed about at great length, about how it would make a supreme weapon. It displays the Chekov adage perfectly - if you show a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it better go off in the third. We also laugh because Muareen and her mother are so nasty, so disgusting and despicable that one of them deserves a sweet release. But not all the characters die - some are beaten with shovels, others crashed into walls, others have their heads shot off: and somehow they return, bloodied, confused, but alive, as stupid and indestructible as ever. And at times the violence is not funny, but chillingly cold - like when Maureen burns her mother's hand in boiling oil. We are caught in between, as our laughs melt into gasps. Juxtaposed to all this violence is an attention to the prosaic. In an instant the characters can go from arguing about the merits of different brands of potato crisps to pointing a gun at one another's head. Very Tarantinoesque. Think of Vince and Jules tucking their guns into their shorts as they leave the diner in their "dork" t-shirts at the end of Pulp Fiction. One of McDonagh's characters blows off his father's head because he makes fun of his haircut. Sure, all this is funny, but I think McDonagh is also trying to show the petty, ignorant absurdity that is the human condition. Like Edward Albee there is a lot of witty repartee between the characters. They use esoteric words like "maudlin" that belie their boorish ignorance. Two of the brothers call one another "virgin gayboys." I don't know, but there is something funny about brothers calling one another "virgin gayboys." Not far from the way so many of the brothers I knew growing up talked to one another. The construction of the narratives are tight, dramatic, usually with sharp twist at the end. I've heard it before, and it was written in the New Yorker, that McDonagh is finished with play writing. So be it. But if Six Shooter is a sign of where he plans to go with film in the future, rest assured we will be entertained.

If you enjoy the wit and humor of Tennessee Williams' true life dramas, then this modern Irish playwright needs to be on your shelves. McDonagh uses realism to create a wonderful picture of unpleasant lives. Just as the drama begins to take shape, he tosses in a twist of tragic humor that takes surprise to a new level. His "Beauty Queen" and "Lonesome West" have both been nominated for several awards, and they both are very deserving nominees.

I have not seen the plays performed, but McDonagh's seering language and strange, fun, repulsive characters make the read worth it for any fan of good, original drama.

McDonagh has created in her plays, a poignantly real and bitingly humerous reality. Her characters are so true that it is easy to forget that we are not right there in the small Irish house with Mag and Maureen. Extraordinarily performed on Broadway, "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" is certainly a far superior production to the ridiculously star studded ART!