A Passing Beauty

By the time Chicago theatre-goers read this review, the Three Crows Theatre production of Martin McDonagh’s play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, will most likely have already closed.  Its foreshortened run — just 12 performances in 11 days, closing September 17 — is the result of a fire at the theatre company’s original venue.  

This is triply unfortunate for Chicago theatre-goers (not to mention for the actors and staff of Three Crows Theatre!) First, it deprives those who have not yet seen the play the opportunity to get acquainted with the psychologically acute and painfully twisted brilliance of Martin McDonagh, who also wrote the screenplays for the superb films In Bruges and the Banshees of Inershin, and the plays The Cripple of Inishmaan and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. 

Second, it means that those who have never before seen his 1996 production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (originally mounted in Chicago at Steppenwolf Theatre) will have to wait for another production to come around again some day, unless they get a chance to see it in another city.  That would be a shame, because this is a powerful and unsettling play.  

In many ways, Beauty Queen will feel very familiar for those with an interest in Irish theatre; like so many Irish dramas before it, the play concerns rural entrapment and family dysfunction — with, at its center, a lonely person imprisoned by familial obligations in a beautiful but poverty-stricken little village who is surrounded by crude Guinness swillers, and who struggles to make something of her life and escape the endemic cruelty, stupidity and poverty before her time entirely runs out.

That’s the basic set-up of Beauty Queen, directed in Three Crows’ production by Daniel Sappington.  Selena Lopez (also Three Crows’ Artistic Director and Co-Founder) plays a frustrated, volatile middle-aged woman trapped with a querulous and unpleasant mother (Judith Laughlin) who she feels, not without reason, is blocking her from love, marriage, and, most of all, escape from her passionless existence.  Sample expression of endearment from daughter to mother: “Shut up and eat your porridge!”

After a slow-burn first act dominated by bickering, stale biscuits, and endless cups of tea and bowls of porridge that constitute the depressing routine of the mother’s and daughter’s aimless lives (I thought of T.S. Eliot’s line, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”) Selena Lopez’s character meets a solid, thoughtful and kind man played by Nathaniel Negron, with whom she has an intimate, if not fully sexual, evening.  In his words, she is his “beauty queen.”

If you believe that the mother is thrilled for her daughter’s happiness and does everything she can to encourage the union, you’ve never seen an Irish play.  Suffice to say that when the daughter sees an opportunity to emigrate to Boston with her new man, she burns her mother’s much-hated powdered-milk nutritional drink in their home’s little wood stove, in a little gesture to obliterate her painful past. (It is no coincidence that the drink bears the brand name “Complan,” which sounded to me for much of the play like the mother’s very favorite activity, “complain.”)  When the mother interferes with her daughter’s plans in a surprisingly suspenseful but particularly devious way, the daughter does not take it lying down.  The result is an emotional pressure cooker, stoked by impressively focused performances from all of the principals, that explodes in the confined space of the small theatre the Three Crows company has borrowed for this production. 

McDonagh, who also wrote the screenplays for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and the less successful Seven Psychopaths, seems to have a thing about hands.  If you’ve seen the Banshees of Insherin, you won’t soon forget the thunking sound of severed fingers flung against a wooden door, and his play A Behanding in Spokane concerns a man who has been searching for his missing left hand for 27 years.  There’s a similarly disarming scene in Beauty Queen that is not for the easily upset.  Nothing about McDonagh, for that matter, is easy; though he can be accused of sensationalism and exaggeration, he never shies from painful emotional truths.

The third reason the early closing of Beauty Queen is unfortunate is that it will deprive many theatre-goers of the opportunity to be introduced to Three Crows Theatre Company, which admirably maintains a pay-what-you-want policy for all of its productions.  But that’s easily remedied, albeit not immediately; their production of The Danish Play, a true story of the Danish Resistance during World War II, opens on May 24, 2024 and will have a full run extending to June 16. 

Highly Recommended

Review by Michael Antman 

Presented by Three Crows Theatre Company at Raven Theatre, 5145 N. Clark Street

Closing night tickets are pay-what-you-want and available at threecrowstheatre.com.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.