Martin McDonagh: Remember the Name

NEW YORK —  Here’s a sure sign of a playwright in total control: The audience is sitting in their seats, their hearts pounding, while onstage virtually nothing is going on. In the case of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a play by Irish boy-wonder Martin McDonagh, an overly large and nasty old woman in a jaunty cap is rocking in her chair, where she always sits. Next to her is a piece of paper, a letter for her daughter that a neighbor has left in her care. She rocks. She looks vacantly out. And a strange sound is coming off of the audience. A thousand people are praying she won’t do to that letter what they know she’s going to do.

“Beauty Queen” is a juicy story, a family melodrama that takes several unexpected, horrific turns. When written badly, this kind of story is called soap opera. When Euripides or O’Neill take a pen to it, it’s forever.

Obviously, it’s early in the game to compare Martin McDonagh with the greats, but the gory beauty of “Beauty Queen,” one work in a trilogy, makes it very tempting. This season, McDonagh makes his American debut with two plays (London has already seen four). “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” from another of the playwright’s trilogies, is playing off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, while “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” which sold out its six-week engagement at the Atlantic Theatre Company in March, opened Thursday night on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre. Between “Beauty Queen’s” off-Broadway and Broadway opening, McDonagh turned 28.

He may not be a master yet, but when that old woman sits rocking in her chair, not even looking at the letter by her side, there’s no doubt that Martin McDonagh is a master storyteller. “Beauty Queen” features the original, impeccable four-member cast from Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company. The director, Garry Hynes, discovered the play by the unknown author in a stack of submissions. “Beauty Queen” tells the story of a mother, Mag (Anna Manahan), and her daughter Maureen (Marie Mullen), living together in a small town in County Galway, where porridge and Complan (powdered soup) and hidden horrors mark their cramped, lonely existence.

Maureen is a 40-year-old virgin who has been stranded at home taking care of an exceptionally crabby, annoying mother, a woman so used to being waited on that at first we think she is unable to walk. In fact, when Mag stands up for the first time, we laugh because it turns out she is even more impossible than we had already perceived. McDonagh loves to surprise audiences, to constantly remind us that what we’ve assumed about his characters is just a half-baked assumption. Whenever you think you fully comprehended the dynamic between Mag and Maureen, you haven’t, not until the play’s final seconds.

The household dynamic is interrupted by the arrival of a former neighbor, Pato (Brian F. O’Byrne), which is announced by his brother Ray (Tom Murphy). Pato’s interest in Maureen offers her a chance for escape that escalates the daily power struggle between mother and daughter into human warfare and violence. If the play becomes oddly exhilarating, it’s because McDonagh has a taste for gore; he finds life in it.

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Downtown, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” also contains terrible twists of fate for our plucky hero, a young man who, like everyone else on the island, wants to be a part of “Man of Aran,” the 1934 documentary that Robert Flaherty is making there. The two plays share a love of hoary melodramatic devices--people listening behind doors, fateful letters, unexpected turnabouts in plots. But rather seeming cheesy, these eventful plots, in which frozen lives are suddenly subject to high drama, are pleasurable. McDonagh floods his love of the old-fashioned story with something entirely new, his own particular humor, which finds naked hostility comic and which lets characters unself-consciously say the harshest things. “I’d like to hit that [man] in the teeth,” says a sweet elderly lady in “Cripple,” pausing briefly. “With a brick.”

There’s something a little too theoretical or poetical about the title character in “Cripple,” a disabled boy so ugly his loving aunties compare him unfavorably to a goat. For when Cripple Billy appears onstage, in the form of the appealing Irish actor Ruaidhri Conroy, he has a shining boy’s face, and seems eminently lovable, mangled feet or not. Billy’s quest for some kind of life in the world, whether through Hollywood or through loving a feral local girl named Helen (Aisling O’Neill), is touching. But, under the direction of Jerry Zaks and with a largely American cast, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” is unevenly affecting, and seems to be written by a talented writer who is trying out his gifts.

The mother and daughter in “Beauty Queen,” on the other hand, are fleshy and painfully mortal. Though their drama goes over the top into gothic, they are never theoretical. They are frighteningly well matched, fated opponents in the plainest of settings. Welcome to the world of Martin McDonagh, fierce storyteller, whose work, it seems clear, is here to stay.

* “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St., (800) 432-7250.

* “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” Joseph Papp Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., (800) 432-7250.