STAGE WEST: "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" from Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company

Jessica John (left) and Deborah Gilmour Smyth in "The Beauty Queen of Leenane."  Photo by Daren Scott

            In staging back to back in 2024 two dark and unsettling dramas – first, Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” and now Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” -- Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company must be applauded for its sheer bravery. These are disturbing pieces of theater that challenge the artists in them and audiences alike.
            “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” which opened Saturday night at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center downtown, hasn’t been produced in San Diego in more than 20 years. The first entry in Irish playwright McDonagh’s “Leenane Trilogy,” it is, on the surface, a dysfunctional mother/daughter battle royal played out in a suffocatingly claustrophobic cottage in County Galway. But the deep dive that McDonagh takes into the characters of 70-year-old Mag Folan (Deborah Gilmour Smyth) and her 40-year-old spinster daughter Maureen (Jessica John) explores the human soul at its most fractured and tormented.
             “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” is not for the faint of heart.
            And yet …
            Who among us has never felt, as Maureen does, the profound disillusion and disappointment sometimes meted out by life? How many of us have known the frustration and even fury that can accompany caring for an aging loved one who’s perhaps slipping into dementia?
            If “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” was only a nightmare fairy tale, it wouldn’t be as gripping or as immersive a work of theater as it is.
            There may be a framed photo of John F. Kennedy and a crucifix on the wall in the home Mag and Maureen share but there is nothing like idealism or holiness there. Insulting each other the while, self-suffering daughter waits on self-suffering mother. Any tinge of lightness comes from the telly or from idle gossip. Affection there is none.
            Mag growls and complains and shifts in her chair like she’s perpetually trying not to roll over on a sore. Maureen, often staring dead-eyed as if at a better future hopelessly elusive to her, alternates between slow boil and martyrdom.
            The entry into the story of the Dooley brothers, the younger Ray (Nick Daugherty) and the older Pato (MJ Sieber), opens up the drama, momentarily uplifts it and ultimately proves the catalyst for the psychological explosions and worse to come.
            Good-hearted, slightly awkward Pato is an imagined romance out of Maureen’s past, she who has never known a man nor any experience with love. His return to Leenane from England on a visit immediately represents hope for desperately lonely Maureen. Her anguished longing to be not just loved (and to love) but to be free is matched in intensity by Mag’s pathological will to prevent it.
            McDonagh has a tendency to not so subtly telegraph the violence ahead (see a poker and a frying pan), but that does not diminish the palpable atmosphere of dread.
            Is what ensues the result of cruelty or madness? Or both? The playwright has these questions hover over the brutality and the despair. (The script only missteps once, near the end, where Ray observes out loud what we the audience can obviously see in a changed Maureen.)
            A skilled director, Francis Gercke allows his actors to fully inhabit this searing tragedy unfolding on a deceptively quaint set by Tony Cucuzzella. Gilmour Smyth and John are paired as mother and daughter for the second time in 10 months at Backyard Renaissance: The two had gone head to head in the theater’s triumphant “August: Osage County,” also directed by Gercke. Mother/daughter relationship-wise, that dynamic in retrospect feels like a stroll in the park when compared to “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.” Though the fact that the two actors have made this work twice in two highly charged plays speaks to the director’s guidance, to their own formidable abilities and to the trust they clearly have in each other onstage.
            Deborah Gilmour Smyth once again demonstrates her fearlessness and commitment to a character, including one like Mag who most will deem, as do I, wholly unsympathetic. Mag’s machinations are predictable, but with a shift of her eyes or a nervous movement Gilmour Smyth does not allow her to ever become a one-dimensional or frankly monstrous antagonist.
            One could say that Maureen is a mutual antagonist, and though this character is worthy of sympathy she is at once impulsive and calculating when it comes to confronting the bete noire that is her mother. Jessica John brings every bit of this psychological complexity and undone physicality to her powerfully affecting performance.
            As Pato, MJ Sieber’s Act Two monologue in which he’s composing a letter to Maureen offering himself and offering her a way out, is the one note of genuine sensitivity in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.” Pato is no prize, but Sieber makes him feel like one.
            The unfiltered Ray character pops in and out of the cottage to provide comic relief but also to set the table for some serious confrontations between Mag and Maureen. The likable Nick Daugherty seizes each opportunity.
            There are multiple reminders in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” that this is an Irish play set in Ireland. The actors employ authentic dialect coached by Backyard Renaissance’s Grace Delaney, though only Sieber’s is decipherable at all times during the production. There’s also the illusion that just outside Mag’s and Maureen’s kitchen window is the land of Erin in all its rich, haunting beauty.
            Inside, Maureen, the “beauty queen of Leenane,” is haunted and broken and dangerously despairing. Mag? She awaits a birthday dedication on the wireless and a song from her past.
            That sound you hear is the sound of two restless hearts beating.
            “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” runs through July 13 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center, downtown.