Exhibitionism

The Beauty Queen of Leenane: The Price of War

State Theater,

through September 24

Running Time: 2 hrs, 5 min

At first, all is peaceful in the gray cottage in the Irish village of Leenane. Patsy Goldwater's Mag Folan is alone, ensconced in a chair before the television, the low voices from it creating a tranquilizing buzz. But then Jill Parker-Jones' Maureen Folan enters from outside, and immediately you can sense that this is no happy home; it's a war zone. Her movements are the stiff, sharp actions of someone barely containing rage. Her burning eyes and tightly drawn face reveal her to be spoiling for a fight, and her body is tense with the anticipation of combat. When Mag speaks, Maureen registers the words of her mother like gunfire. And her own words she lobs back like artillery shells, with the aim of inflicting the most damage possible.

Parker-Jones' fiercely physical performance informs much of this State Theater Company production of Martin McDonagh's play. Through her, we can feel not only the strength of the hostility at hand but also its depth, how time has rooted it in the core of these people's beings and deepened its color into wine-dark resentment and spite. Director Don Toner and his company strikingly evoke McDonagh's village of brutal feuds and long memories. It's in set designer Richard Isackes' drab and heavy cottage, where the stains of smoke read like battlefield scars from the unending series of bitter skirmishes between mother and daughter. It's in Guy Roberts' rambunctious, scatterbrained young tough, Ray, who all but bounces off the walls railing about Maureen taking a ball from him when he was a boy. Truly, this Leenane is a place where, as Ray puts it, "You can't kick a cow without someone bearing a grudge for 20 years."

But it's also a place where someone can keep a crush for 20 years, and therein lies Beauty Queen's hope. A longtime admirer of Maureen's, Ray's brother Pato, finally makes his affections known, and the 40-year-old Maureen sees the possibility of escape from her life of wearying war. Again, Parker-Jones feelingly conveys the ache of years in Maureen's loneliness and the way it fuels her desperation to break free of it. And she is matched by Dave Florek's Pato, whose eyes bear the faraway, forlorn look of a man old enough to see that his life is missing something. Their tender kindling of a too-long delayed romance is a special pleasure here.

That Pato and Maureen's future together is doomed must be a given when it begins on a battlefield. The war between Maureen and Mag has gone too far, runs too deep; Mag will retaliate. There isn't the fire in Goldwater's performance that burns in Parker-Jones' -- Goldwater keeps her Mag cool, coy, deflecting Maureen's assaults with mock innocence -- but we can see the determination beneath her lowered brow, in the set lines above them. This take cheats us of the explosive confrontations between Maureen and Mag, not to mention Mag's near-delicious monstrosity as seen in other stagings. Still, it doesn't blunt the ultimate point: Mag will have her way, and the war will claim another victim.

In all, this is a fine production for Don Toner to draw the curtain on his 13-year run as the State's producing artistic director. The acting is strong, the pacing tight, the humor abundant and sharply delivered; it's a cracking good story crisply told. And if the fireworks between Mag and Maureen aren't blinding, they still reveal the price of a war fought in the gloomy confines of a cottage in County Galway.