Beauty Queen Of Leenane, The

In Mag and Maureen Folan, the protagonists of The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, Martin McDonagh has created what may be the most unpleasant mother and daughter since A Taste Of Honey. These two harridans languish in a Sam-Shepard-With-Brogues family dynamic characterized by a torpid malaise whose only amusement is derived from annoying one another. And though McDonagh slyly manipulates his audience into sympathizing, first with one, and then the other, in the end, neither has any redeeming qualities to make us regard them with anything but a repugnance which changes to horror when an avenue of escape raises the stakes in their dysfunctional game. Despite protests from shocked playgoers unaccustomed to seeing women depicted so inhumanely, the bitterness and tension at the roots of McDonagh's grand-guignol motifs are hideously plausible, as social workers today will readily attest. Laurie Metcalf and Aideen O'Kelly act up a storm, pulling never a punch in their portrayals of, respectively, the high-strung Maureen (played by Rondi Reed after August 8) and the phlegmatic Mag, while Rick Snyder and Christopher Fitzgerald hold their ground as middle-aged Pato and adolescent Ray, two unsuspecting men naive enough to still believe in the universality of filial devotion and the inherent saintliness of females.