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Set in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway, this play tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain and lonely woman in her early forties, and Mag, her manipulative aging mother, whose interference in Maureen's first and possibly final chance of a loving relationship sets in motion a train of events that leads inexorably towards the play's terrifying denouement. |
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| 2000 Newfoundland
and Labrador Drama Festival Winner Winner of Awards for ... 
Best Presentation of a Full-Length Play
Best Set Design - Clar Doyle
Best Actress - Jacinta Mackey-Graham.Nominations for ...
Best Actor - Mike Coady
Best Supporting Actress - Janette Ferguson- Planchat
Best Actor under 21 Years - Ryan Tilley
Best Stage Management - Katherine Elliott |
| March 29 - April 2 Wednesday to Saturday 8:30 pm Sunday Matinee at 2:30 pm LSPU Hall St. John's, NF |
April 28 Friday 8 pm Arts and Culture Centre Stephenville, NF |
The Express - a "Beauty Queen" article
The Muse - a "Beauty Queen" article
The Telegram - Review of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane"
Article on the outcome of the 2000 Provincial Drama Festival
Bringing Ireland home The Beothuck Street Players have adapted the Irish play Beauty Queen of Leenane. Its themes of daughter against mother, and getting the heck out of the village, are as old as the hills. But will Newfoundland audiences love it?
By KATHLEEN LIPPA, The Express
Beothuck Street Players director Kevin Lewis has seen a lot over the span of 25 years in Newfoundland theatre. Yet he was still completely blown away by the work of a now 27-year-old Irish playwright, Martin McDonagh, who wrote the script for the Players' latest production, The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
"There was a buzz about it out of Ireland first," Lewis says, talking about Beauty Queen's script, McDonagh's first play.
"Some of our people saw it in New York, others saw it in Toronto. And the production and performances even re-emphasized the power of the script. So we said, 'Let's go for it.'"
When the play debuted a little over two years ago in Ireland, it created a huge stir, and eventually hit Broadway in New York, where it ended up receiving four Tony awards.
"Its production rings with authenticity," raved one on-line arts review from New York, "having arrived with its original cast, director and design team from Ireland's Druid Theatre and Royal Court in London."
Other reviews, such as one from the Weekly Telegraph in Ireland, praised the play's "consummate craftsmanship - short, sharp, superbly plotted," and brought in the voice of the Druid's director, Garry Hynes, who remarked: "What really stuck me [about the script], apart from its inherent qualities, was that it was set in a country kitchen. Nobody's dared do that in Ireland since 1955."
But McDonagh, who apparently wrote the play in eight days, once revealed to the Weekly Telegraph, "I like the trick of leading the audience up to think they're dealing with an archetypal Irish situation, and then you give them a great smack and show that they aren't."
Lewis, sensing the play's tremendous potential appeal to Newfoundland audiences, waited patiently to get the rights to perform it.
"We had to wait almost two years... So Clar Doyle kept checking on the net with the publisher, until we finally got permission last spring. And we immediately jumped on it."
Lewis has been rehearsing the play with the Beothuck Street Players steadily since the beginning of February. He says it's been a pleasure as the Players, inspired by the script, come prepared and raring to go at every rehearsal. The cast includes Mike Coady, Jacinta Mackey-Graham, Janette Ferguson-Planchat, and Ryan Tilley.
"It's a lot of work, but it has to be fun, too," Lewis says. "If there's not a relaxed atmosphere, there's no chance for the actors to create. I'm only waving the baton, they're playing the music."
Some critics, though - especially the ones who observed the New York production - have attacked the play for being "calculated" and "regrettably empty." McDonagh's background in theatre is spotty, so while he's touted as a wunderkind, there are inevitable questions about his staying power and ability to reproduce the success of Beauty Queen.
"McDonagh is unquestionably a talented young writer," breezed one on-line review, from nytheatre.com, from 1998. "He has a positive flair for the poetry of everyday conversation, a strong and sure sense of plot and incident, and a knack for creating lovable characters against rather sizable odds." But, the same reviewer whines: "This is a soap opera, not a play, and there's nothing to be gleaned here about the human condition or the human heart."
This doesn't sound like a problem that will plague the current St. John's cast.
They spend much time between runs of this intense work showing nothing but heart, as they laugh and carry on - always in their character-inspired Irish accents - poking fun at their dialogue and unflattering costumes.
"If you read the script, you'll notice there is a fair amount of violence," Lewis says.
"We really worked to tame that down, pulled back a lot, especially on the really gory violence - well, gory might not be the right word - but, for example, there's a scene where the daughter drags the mother to the stove. She's trying to find out what was in the letter the mother burnt. And she puts [mother's] hand on the stove…The way it was written it was melodramatic," Lewis says, explaining how he toned down the action so that in Beothuck Street's version, the mere threat of the hot stove is enough to make the mother confess.
"We worked on it as a cast, pulling out the tenderness, the loneliness of the people, and the conflict between mother and daughter without there being overkill with the violence."
Lewis says the Players are seriously looking to produce another one of McDonagh's plays - part of a trilogy of plays set in the same area, in Leenane (pronounced Lee-Nan). But he won't reveal which one, for fear some other group "might grab it."
"Right now in rehearsal, a lot of the scenes - even at this stage, with another month to go - are blowing me away," Lewis says of Beauty Queen. Most recently Beothuck Street have been rehearsing in Gonzaga High School's music room in the evenings.
"They're blowing me away, and the production people. It's the cast doing the work - coming prepared, doing the work at home."
The play runs from Mar. 26 until April 2 at the LSPU Hall, and then heads to the drama festival in Stephenville, where it will be performed April 28.
Volume 50, Issue 21 - Friday, March 24, 2000
The beauty queen on Beothuck Street
Martin McDonagh’s award-winning Broadway play comes to Newfoundland
The cast of The Beauty Queen of Leenane are excited about performing this weekend. Photo courtesy of Beothuck Street Players
By IAN FOSTER
Written by 27 year old Irishman Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a play which opened on Broadway two years ago. At the time, it picked up four Tony Awards and earned much praise from fans and critics alike.
Now, Newfoundlanders will have the opportunity to experience this much-anticipated theatrical performance, as the local Beothuck Street Players will be launching the play at the LSPU Hall on March 29.
As the poster for the show reads, the play is "An Epic Battle of Oppression, Power, and Squashed Dreams." The story is the first in a trilogy, and takes place in the western part of Ireland. Four characters - Old Mag, Maureen, Pato Dooley, and Ray - carry the plot along, and each one’s performance is quickly established and masterfully crafted. Old Mag is the mother of Maureen, a woman who will stop at nothing to hold onto her daughter. Maureen is a 40 year old woman who wishes to finally break away from her mother’s shadow, but cannot. Pato Dooley is a man from London who finally presents Maureen with her opportunity, and Ray is Pato’s brother, who provides the comic relief for the tale.
The play truly begins when Pato Dooley comes into the mix. As he and Maureen become closer, mother’s grip slowly loosens. However, Dooley must return to England after a time, and soon sends a vital letter to Maureen through his brother Ray. However, when Ray arrives at Maureen’s home and finds only the mother, the plot thickens.
There are many interesting devices at work in the story. The idea of the vitally important letter, which will decide the fate of almost every character is a fairly common one. (Perhaps most notably in Romeo and Juliet). Also, the nature of the characters and their dramatic performances has a certain quality that Tennessee Williams probably would have appreciated. People can easily identify with the struggle of Maureen to finally begin a life that should have begun 20 years earlier, and are quickly repulsed by the mother’s actions opposing her daughter’s freedom. For instance, when the first letter of invitation arrives from Pato Dooley, Maureen’s mother tries in vain to stop her daughter from going to the party by thrusting it into the oven.
In terms of what people can expect from the Beothuck Street Players version of the piece, Director Kevin Lewis says it’s much the same, minus some of the violent scenes which the original piece contained. "Friends of mine who saw the play in New York and Toronto were basically turned off by the violence . . . so I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to do it that way. So basically we don’t have the violence, we have the threat of the violence."
Barring the violent scenes, the play was quite an attractive prospect to the Beothuck Street Players, and is one that they have been vying for for quite some time. "As soon as two or three of us read it, we said this is a dynamite script." Lewis adds. "We really wanted to do it, but we just couldn’t get the rights." Fortunately, the deal eventually came through.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane features Michael Coady, Jacinta Mackey-Graham, Janette Ferguson-Planchat, and Ryan Tilley in the starring roles, and is produced by Ted Quinlan. The set for the show was designed by Clar Doyle, who is the acting Dean of Education at Memorial University.
And as with any foreign production, there is the question of whether it applies to the Newfoundland setting. Lewis says it does. "It’s a universal theme, especially as it applies to Newfoundland, or any place where people are trapped by circumstances - whether it’s family circumstances or social circumstances."
The Beauty Queen of Leenane will be playing at the LSPU Hall from March 29 to April 2. It is Beothuck Street’s festival entry in the 2000 provincial drama festival, which will be held in Stephenville.
Top Stories - Lifestyles
For Thursday, March 30, 2000
Little beauty in stark story 3/30/00
By GORDON JONESSpecial to The Telegram
Nowhere are petty malice and gratuitous cruelty more deeply rooted than in the fetid soil of dysfunctional families. In Martin McDonagh’s ironically titled The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the family in question is a querulous, manipulative, semi-invalid mother (Janette Planchard) and her embittered, middle-aged, spinster daughter (Jacinta Graham), who is her mother’s sole care-giver. Shackled to one another by chains of custom, responsibility and dependence, mother and daughter wage domestic warfare with weapons of lumpy porridge, withheld messages, revelations of intimate secrets, deliberate purchase of the wrong biscuits, or musing aloud about the day of the mother’s funeral.
The setting is a traditional kitchen in a small town in Connemara, County Galway. Leenane represents rural, economically depressed Ireland in a time antecedent to the current economic boom, in a place distant from the green tiger of the Dublin-based economy. Leenane is a place from which its citizens travel to England for low-paid jobs as labourers and maids, or from which they emigrate permanently to the Promised Land of Boston.
For the frustrated daughter, the only escape from the confines of Leenane and her mother’s clutch is marriage to one of the few men available to her — Pato (Michael Coady), a likeable, middle-aged migrant labourer. But her dreams of self-fulfilment are destroyed by the fecklessness of Pato’s cocky, layabout younger brother (Ryan Tilley) and the selfishness of her cunning old mother.
Written in the 1990s, it harks back to the 1950s. By turns petty and savage, commonplace and macabre, sardonic and melodramatic, it is not a pretty picture of family life or Irish society. To paraphrase the text, it is about auld Ireland — creepy auld Ireland.
In the first act, vigorous, convincing dialogue is peppered with comic insult and savage invective. Domestic action and characterization move along briskly. In the second act, though, things slow down considerably and the inexperience of the young playwright starts to show. Pato’s epistolary monologue from London is matched for theatrical awkwardness by the daughter’s long, delusional monologue after she has settled things with her mother. A melodramatic climax is followed by a prolonged, ironic coda.
The deliberateness of the script in the second act is accentuated by pacing that verges on the ponderous — pacing that milks and overarticulates the drama. The use of the apron in front of the box set for leisurely entrances from outside (three in the first act, two in the second) also slows action unnecessarily, as well as disrupting the audience’s involvement with the kitchen set.
The play boasts two big female roles, the mother — stolid, mean, sly, self-centred, spiteful; and the daughter — bitter, vengeful, delusional. Planchard is very convincing as the nasty old woman who empties her chamber pot in the kitchen sink, amongst other unloveable characteristics. Graham’s rendering of the daughter is powerful, but it is generally too vivid and overdramatic. The part contains enough natural drama and a sufficiency of melodrama to allow for less attack in performance than was evident on opening night.
Directed by Kevin Lewis, the Beothuck Street Players’ production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane continues its run until Sunday at the LSPU Hall, prior to heading to Stephenville for the Newfoundland and Labrador Drama Festival in the last week of April. Curtain time is 8:30 p.m., except for Sunday, when they close with a matinee at 2:30 p.m.
The Telegram
Columbus Drive · P.O. Box 5970 ·
St. John's · Newfoundland · A1C 5X7
Copyright © telegram@thetelegram.com
For Thursday, March 30, 2000
Top Stories - Lifestyles
Friendliest competition since spin the bottle 5/1/00
By Peter FenwickSpecial to The Telegram—Stephenville
If Newfoundland’s performing arts have grown into a cultural industry that is the envy of the country, the annual Provincial Drama Festival must take much of the credit.
It is the showcase for the talent incubators, the amateur theatre companies across the province. Without the festival, the talent that is so obvious today would not have had the chance to develop in the friendliest competition since spin the bottle.
When the Beothuck Street Players arrived at the reception after their performance of the Beauty Queen of Leenane, the other companies gave them a raucous and enthusiastic reception. Despite the competitive nature of the festival, the other actors and techies were truly pleased that they had spiked their performance. The Beauty Queen also copped the festival award for best play, an honour they truly deserved. Jacinta Mackey-Graham garnered the best actress award for the same production with her moving portrayal of deepening insanity and revenge. Clar Doyle also won for his meticulously detailed set, and Ryan Tilley won the D.A. Matthews under-21 scholarship.
The Carol Players rendition of West Moon won the audience appreciation award along with a clutch of other kudos. They won for best visual presentation. The Molson award went to them and Al Pittman jointly for best Canadian play. They also received the Adjudicator’s Award for ensemble acting, the Margaret Doyle Award for depicting the true spirit of the festival, and the Hillier Award for costumes that best enhance the interpretation of the overall production.
Craig Blumer of Gander’s Avion Players won the award for best male actor, Bert Peddle for best supporting actor, Wayne Hurley won the best director award, and Michael Power picked up the VOCM scholarship award that goes to an actor in a short course theatre school.
The Northcliffe Players of Grand Falls-Windsor’s Amy Anthony won the best young actress award and the under-21 full-time theatre school scholarship.
The St. John’s Players’ Kim Fiander won best supporting actress while Philip Daniel won for his lighting and Amanda Joseph for her stage direction. Justin Tilley also won the special 50th anniversary scholarship for his portrayal of Joe in Jimmy Dean.
Glen Tizzard and David Crocker won the sound award for their work on Bay Theatre’s Agnes of God.
While I called some of the awards differently, the only real exception I take to the choices of adjudicator Jeff Pitcher is the work of the Mokami Players for their Day in The Death of Joe Egg. I loved the play and would have given Ian C. Feltham an award for his portrayal of the man stuck with what to do with a child in pain.
While the awards are the adjudicator’s way of recognizing the outstanding effort of the companies, most of the participants would have been just as happy if there had been no competition. For most of them the high they got when the curtain lowered and the audience rose in applause was more than enough. The actors, directors, and techies would spend hours in the green room afterward enthusiastically talking about the choices they made in putting on the plays, the things that went wrong, the tough piece of dialogue that finally worked, and the on-stage improvisation that was better than the playwright’s lines.
The festival also brought together grizzled veterans, like Clar Doyle, Kevin Lewis and Wayne Hurley so that they could mentor and teach the newcomers with promise like Amy Anthony, Ryan Tilley, Michael Power and Tasha Chaulk. Just as the veterans benefited by the guidance and experience of the actors and directors of 50 years ago, the new crop is benefiting by the unselfish help of the current stars.
The incubator that has produced the explosion of talent that is Newfoundland is still doing its thing, producing the playwrights, directors and actors of the future.
The Telegram
Columbus Drive · P.O. Box 5970 ·
St. John's · Newfoundland · A1C 5X7
Copyright © telegram@thetelegram.com
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