Sometimes, under the right conditions, you can become the very thing you hate.
Life is rarely that simple, or the Irish Heritage Theatre’s upcoming production of playwright Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” would be incredibly short. Instead, the path to a ghastly, deeply sad predestined fate can be winding indeed. And therein lies a brilliant story.
McDonagh’s tale paints a vivid portrait of two women living together in Connemara, County Galway – the spinster Maureen Folan and Mag, her 70-year-old mother, both trapped in a painful pas de deux, with the longsuffering Maureen as sole caregiver for the detestable, demanding Mag.
One day, an attractive construction worker named Pato, who has been living and working in London for 20 years, appears in their midst. He reveals that he was smitten with Maureen all those years before – he had always thought of her as “The Beauty Queen of Leenane – potentially offering Maureen a long sought after way out.
Does Maureen escape Mag’s cruel clutches? Does she find love at last?
You’ll have to see the play to find out, but actor Kirsten Quinn, who portrays and relishes the part of the troubled Maureen, offers some clues and explains why this work by McDonagh is so tantalizing.
“Maureen has had a major history,” Quinn explains. “She’s been hospitalized, or 302’d (an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization) by her mother back when Maureen was younger. As the years have progressed, the relationship between the two becomes more and more strained. And McDonagh doesn’t pull any punches. In the beginning of the play, we see these two people with a real sense of deep loneliness and a sense of desperation and isolation. Pato presents an opportunity to break free of all that. So getting to play the part of Maureen, just in the rehearsal process, has been really challenging. I’ve just been enjoying digging into someone like her.”
Maureen, who gets her own back in her frequently horrid fashion, defies easy categorization. So does the play. Quinn says she says “Beauty Queen” could best be described as falling into the gothic or horror category. There is violence, she says, a gradual ratcheting up of tension. But at the same time, a thread of Irish dark humor runs throughout. “From the outset,” she says, “there are a lot of vicious, funny things that people say to each other. The two juxtapose. That’s very interesting.”
Mary Pat Walsh plays Mag, and, like Quinn, she embraces the complexity of her character. It would be oversimplistic to say Mag simply is a villain. There is still a vulnerability to her, a need to have someone look after her, Quinn says, and all she has is Maureen.
“And so, even though Mag orders Maureen around the house, there’s still this need,” Quinn says. “She couldn’t do without Maureen, no matter how awful Maureen is.”
“Beauty Queen” is something of departure for IHT. Last season featured George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell.” McDonagh is a contemporary Irish playwright.
“We kind of go back and forth between contemporary classics and more of those older plays,” Quinn says. “This is the first time we’re doing Martin McDonagh, which is really exciting for us, and we’re finding things that we love about this guy. We wanted to look at his stuff, and we were looking over his plays and thinking who would we love to have in this play, and what could we do differently with it. It also hasn’t been performed in Philadelphia for a while.”
McDonagh, she adds, doesn’t flinch from the most uncomfortable situations. “Beauty Queen,” she says, truly is an actor’s play – the roles are all really meaty.
Fleshing out all those challenging roles are, along with Quinn and Walsh, Brian Anthony Wilson and Robert Hargraves.
Irish Heritage Theatre has been presenting plays in Philadelphia since 2011.
“The Beauty Queen of Leenane” previews Friday, March 7, opens Saturday, March 8, and runs through Sunday, March 23, at Plays and Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey Place in Philadelphia. The play is directed by Peggy Mecham. Visit irishheritagetheatre.org for more information and tickets.
