Backyard Renaissance: The Beauty Queen of Leenane
Forty-year-old Maureen lays out the trouble at the outset, in a rant to her infirm and injured mother Mag: if you're Irish and you want to make a go of it, you have to go begging from (and in) either England or America. And if you do that, who's left to take care of the motherland? It's enough to make a person crazy. But here atop this hill in Connemara, playwright Martin McDonagh has managed the neat trick of making the political almost entirely personal, and in so doing, he takes a bad situation and makes it unspeakably awful. Good thing he's funny about it, albeit almost never in the jokey way that might distract from the matter at (reddened, worrisome) hand. Deborah Gilmour Smith's Mag is full of need and needles; all she wants is everything she wants, and isn't it a pity Maureen's sisters left the job to her. Small wonder she indulges dark daydreams about the old woman's funeral — at which she might meet a man who'd like to buy her a drink. As it happens; she does meet a fella, and she doesn't even have to wait until Mom is dead to do it. The downright decent Pat is back in town for a do, then he's back to begging in England. The two hit it off, no thanks to Mag's interfering, and from there, the fine gears mesh and the plot's precision moves toward the inevitable — but also, the surprising. No mean feat, that. Jessica John plays Maureen with something approaching softness at the outset, almost as if her spite is only half-serious. But that's not the half of it. A quiet little horror story that understands how people can be scarier than monsters, fearlessly and flawlessly executed. Directed by Francis Gercke.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, July 7, 2024
Hours
| Sundays, 3pm-5pm |
| Mondays, 7pm-9pm |
| Tuesdays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Wednesdays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Fridays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Saturdays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |