Irish Heritage Theatre presents Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Take, for example, the romantic scene between Maureen Folan (Kirsten Quinn), a terminally unfulfilled woman living under her mother’s thumb in rural Connemara, and Pato Dooley (Brian Anthony Wilson), a transient laborer returning home for a visit from London. When Pato shows sympathy for Maureen’s predicament, she belts back a snappy retort: “Don’t I have to live with it?” A second later, she repeats the same line, this time with ruefulness and resignation. Maureen’s anger comes in two forms: her recognition of the situation and her awareness that it will never change.

Seeking the balance of light and dark

Peggy Mecham’s production hits its stride in quieter moments, like that scene’s wistful coda. She also goes a long way to humanize Maureen’s tormentor and protector, Mag (Mary Pat Walsh), who often comes across as a gorgon in a rocking chair. Walsh portrays Mag with a heartbreaking feebleness and naked sense of codependence, showing how deeply she depends on the daughter she tortures with her eccentricities. It’s the production’s least conventional and most successful performance.

For McDonagh’s vision of desperate living on a cold Irish island, though, a greater balance of light and dark needs to be struck. The edges here are buffed to a defanging degree, and although the play’s sharp writing shines through in moments, it doesn’t always create the desired effect. The direction never achieves a sense of inexorable hurtling toward a devastating conclusion, meant to leave the audience in a sense of both shock and relief.

Wily and relentless

Quinn, a superb stalwart with this company, is slightly miscast here, her natural warmth and likability fighting against Maureen’s corrosive sense of self. She hits her stride in the play’s second act, when Maureen loses herself in a fantasy of an alternate life, but as with much of this staging, a state of equilibrium is never fully achieved. Still, Quinn generates winning chemistry with Wilson, who finds an innate sadness in Pato’s status as an unhappy exile in England. (The cast also includes Rob Hargraves as Pato’s perennially peeved brother Ray.)

The audience should feel the walls of the small shack shared by Maureen and Mag closing in, but AJ Klein’s scenic design doesn’t achieve that sense of heightened claustrophobia. The kitchen-room rendered on the stage of Plays and Players Theatre instead feels open and uncluttered. (And why is there no door, leaving the actors to mime opening and closing the air?) Mecham’s pacing turns slack in long scene changes, which take place only in half-dark, with actors exiting the stage in full view. Although the play comes in at two hours with intermission, it feels like a longer sit.

McDonagh, one of theater’s great contemporary misanthropes, endeavors to show his audience the painful realities that lurk beneath seemingly ordinary—even happy—moments in life. His tone is wily and relentless. IHT’s Beauty Queen could use an extra dollop of both emotions to truly present the world the playwright conveys in his writing.