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Occasionally the Acrosstown Repertory Theater strikes a classical note. Since the eighties, Shakespeare has played there more regularly than anywhere else in town. Sometimes the chord is contemporary. The dramatic choices are often dangerously esoteric, rolling the dice with the theater of the absurd.
Jerry Rose, who directed Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author at the Acrosstown last spring, now brings us a searing drama from modern day Ireland in the tradition of John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey.
Rose was initially attracted to the play by its split nature as a tragicomedy that blends domestic and foreign brews to heady effect. As he explained, "My own dual identities as a professional sociologist and amateur actor and director steered me toward a play with this combination of dramatic and sociological values."
The setting is an Irish country cottage outside the remote village of Leenane in Connemara, County Galway, north of the Aran Islands, near the west coast of Ireland, where Irish is still sometimes spoken.
"This play shows a profound understanding of specifically Irish experiences, customs and national character," said Jerry Rose. "The British colonization of Ireland did not end with the uprisings of the 1920s, as all four characters reflect in different ways."
When The Beauty Queen of Leenane leapt across the ocean in 1998 and arose with the Atlantic Theater Company in Manhattan, no one should have been surprised. McDonagh's favorite play, the one he studied to hone his craft as a playwright, was David Mamet's American Buffalo. And it is Mamet's vision that informs the choices made by the Atlantic, the theater he began with William H. Macy in the eighties.
American Buffalo and The Beauty Queen of Leenane are similar both in their structural dynamics and the bludgeoning rhetoric of alienation. In both the vernaculars of real people become not only immediate and desperate but somehow brutally poetic.
You can see from the opening words of McDonagh's play that the language of conflict, asperity, and tension is going to cut like a knife.
The plot and characters are all hard–edged and well sharpened. The friction of history, real history, that pits the Irish against the English and gets blown all to hell by the bloody Yanks and cannot help but turn us against them, grinds faster and faster till the whole mess starts to smolder.
The wonder of it all is that it is so damn funny. As with Buffalo, where the inhabitants implode in the vast interior of the urban nightmare, here the caged beasts are trapped in an Ireland of the mind, blighted by abusive priests and virulent poverty to the edge of sanity — and over.
Laughter is the appropriate response in the face of fear of the awesome power sparked by our own loathsomeness and its capacity for violence. What are we so angry about?
As if any of us really has the nerve to ask.
There are four kick–ass roles for actors to frolic in. Middle–aged Maureen is at the end of her rope, caring for her age–addled mother Mag, who deliberately not so say disgustingly sabotages any chance her daughter still has for a life. Comes a knock on the door and here's enraged Irish youth in the pissed–off person of young Ray Dooley, ready to smash back at a papist priest with one hand and brain a policeman with a poker with the other.
Then there's the man who can change all that, Ray's uncle, Pato Dooley, who for one near–romantic night holds for Maureen all the promise of modern day Boston.
It's something of a free for all for the actors in that they can think and feel all they want and still remain within, I will not say safely, the confines of the world of the play. It's a world that is mountainous and green and beautiful in a way to take your breath away. And then it closes in on you like the walls of a nuthouse.
McDonagh succeeds by the inventive use of tried and true dramatic devices, the purloined letter, the subtle manipulation of props, a plot with elements that recede and come forward to reveal what has been hidden in plain sight.
"It has all the narrative coherence of any of the great tragedies," Jerry Rose told me, "with people who are victims of circumstances that reflect in part at least their own fatally flawed characters."
Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, directed by Jerry Rose, plays the Acrosstown Repertory Theater, April 19 — May 5.