'night, Mother

Beauty Queen holds court at Trinity

by Carolyn Clay

THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE. By Martin McDonagh. Directed by Brian McEleney. Set design by Michael McGarty. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Russell Champa. With Cynthia Strickland, Phyllis Kay, Sean Meehan, and Fred Sullivan Jr. At Trinity Repertory Company, through March 5.

"Another wet one," remarked an audience member upon entering the theater for the Trinity Rep production of the Tony Award-winning The Beauty Queen of Leenane. On the heels of last fall's Othello, which took place on a platform above a knee-deep pool of water, Beauty Queen comes with its dingy kitchen-parlor set against a towering brick wall streaming with rain. But there is nothing all-wet about Martin McDonagh's brutal and lyrical work, which makes 'night, Mother look like I Remember Mama. The first play by Anglo-Irish phenom McDonagh, written before he was 25, this perversely funny, bleakly melodious piece sings like Synge and, like Synge's playboy, wields a spade.

Along with Conor McPherson and Sebastian Barry, McDonagh has been identified as a major surfer on a great new wave of Irish drama -- even though he lives in a working-class South London neighborhood and has assayed the barren west of Ireland only as a child visiting relatives. Beauty Queen is part of a trilogy that includes A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West; a second, Aran Island-set trilogy comprises The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and The Banshees of Inisheer. An insolent if prodigiously talented young author, McDonagh has gained attention not just for his plays but for snubbing his nose at the stage, which he considers "a leg up" to writing for film.

No one who has seen his plays will be surprised by that bluntness, though it seems a shame to surrender McDonagh's vicious black-comic sensibility to film, which already has its Quentin Tarantino. And what will the movies do with the heightened Irish cadence in which McDonagh cloaks his cruelties -- like spikes sheathed in linguistic brocade? The Beauty Queen of Leenane is more conventionally structured and less eccentrically peopled than The Cripple of Inishmaan (which the American Repertory Theatre produced last year), but it struck me as more bruising. A parent-trap tale set in rural County Galway, the play feeds on the stagnation, anger, and yearning of a dying culture that's being invaded by American dreams and Australian TV. "That's Ireland," sighs the play's title character as her boyfriend prepares to return to a menial job in England, "There's always someone leaving."

And there's always someone stuck but chafing to leave. Maureen Folen is a 40-year-old woman tied to her demanding and manipulative mother, Mag, a whining crone of 70. As has been observed, their symbiotic and mutual loathing would put most positive passions to shame. When Maureen gets an unexpected chance for escape, in the form of a proposition from a man embarking to America, Mag does her spiteful best to thwart it -- with violent and tragic results. They say most women become their mothers, but Maureen, put upon to the point of delusion, goes to extreme lengths to free up Mag's worn chair between the peat-burning stove and the TV.

When The Beauty Queen of Leenane took New York by storm, it featured the original Druid Theatre Company cast and was helmed by the Galway troupe's artistic director, Garry Hynes. At Trinity Rep, where the play is getting its area premiere under Brian Mc-Eleney's direction, a crack American cast does not flinch from McDonagh's savagery, sentiment, or really disgusting running gag about infected "u-rine" being poured down the kitchen sink. If we are not prepared for the callous and painful events of the play's second act, that's partly because the playwright means to disarm us with comedy as chipper as it is black. For example, when Mag relates a tale about a murderer of old women, Maureen responds that she'd love to bring such a fellow home. And when Mag rejoins that "killing you I bet he first would be," the daughter doesn't miss a beat: "I could live with that so long as I was sure he'd be clobbering you soon after. If he clobbered you with a big axe or something and took your oul head off and spat in your neck, I wouldn't mind at all, going first." There is something pretty chilling about such vividly hostile repartee. But the Trinity production sometimes makes the interplay between Mag and Maureen more cute than cruel.

Cynthia Strickland, who plays Mag, is a tough, terrific actress but hardly the mountainous lump of nastiness McDonagh envisions. Twenty years too young for the role, she adopts huge glasses, a grizzled wig, and a slow, splayed walk, not to mention a conniving fake innocence that alternates with snarling, childlike demand. Still, some of what she does is more comic than black. Phyllis Kay brings a straightforward, almost matter-of-fact bitterness to Maureen, but she also captures the character's pent-up vulnerability. Fred Sullivan Jr. is an appealing Pato Dooley, Maureen's midlife suitor, and Sean Meehan, as Pato's failed messenger of a younger brother, exudes the churning energy of youth going nowhere. In these capable hands, The Beauty Queen of Leenane draws a mean laugh, then freezes the smile on your face.