Play 3, 2007

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

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A blend of black comedy, horror and bleak tragedy, set in an isolated Irish village. The play centers on the life of Maureen Folan, a spinster who takes care of her 70 year-old, selfish and manipulative mother Mag. Full of deceptions, secrets and betrayals with plot twists that will keep you guessing.

A wickedly Irish tale

In a small house on a big hill in County Galway, Ireland, the Folan women live out an uneasy truce. Forty-year-old Maureen and her elderly but iron-willed mother Mag spend their days in endless rounds of petty insults and physical threats as each vies for control of their isolated existence. But when an old family friend reappears and offers Maureen a chance at love and a new life, this once-benign terrain grows treacherous and the two women, bound by blood but driven by desperation, will do anything to survive.

The Playwright

This is Martin McDonagh's first play. Written in eight days in 1996, it has won numerous awards in England, Ireland and North America, including four Tony awards on Broadway. In 1997, McDonagh, then aged 27, had four plays running simultaneously in London. Set in 1989, this black comedy is centred around the age-old mother-daughter conflict, in this case taken to the extreme, as it explores the very fine line between comedy and tragedy. The dark humour and crushing brutality of the play is also reflected in the breathtaking beauty as well as the harsh reality of the Connemara landscape in which it is set. The mythologized picture of rural Ireland with its "whimsical gaiety and folksy charm" is replaced with a contrasting view of isolation, depair and violence.

In McDonagh's own words, "I suppose that I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think that one illuminates the other. And yeah, I tend to push things as far as I can because I think you can see things more clearly through exaggeration than through reality".

The Director

Brian Cannon has directed and appeared in numerous plays for Villanova Players. His most recent appearances were as the judge in "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 2005 and the swaggering, belligerent Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof".