Word: mcdonagh
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...Yanks do love the Irish," contemplates Maureen Folan near the end of Martin McDonagh's 1996 play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Indeed, nothing proves this fact so much as the remarkable success of McDonagh's play, which, since its debut four years ago, has garnered four Tony awards and helped to secure McDonagh's reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most promising young playwrights of his generation. Eric Engel's new direction of the play, currently running at the Boston Center for the Arts, proves the mettle of McDonagh's script. Presented...
What is innovative about McDonagh's play is the psychological intensity of his characters and their complex relationship to their squalid surroundings. And fortunately for the Sugan Theater's production, Engels clearly understands the significance of these two aspects. The interactions of Mag and Maureen are given vital importance. The mother and daughter face off like two ferrets in a small cage; behind their petty tauntings and quick-paced reportage of insults, one can see how intent each woman is on destroying the other. Susan Zeeman Roger's set-dirty and sparsely furnished, with a rain machine adding a backdrop...
This week, the Boston Center for the Arts held a panel to discuss both McDonagh's portrayal of Irish culture in a multi-ethnic world and the reason for the play's tremendous popularity. These issues, while compelling, are certainly not new. From John Millington Synge and his Playboy of the Western World to Frank McCourt and the recent phenomenon of Angela's Ashes, the theme of impoverished rural Ireland (dubbed "The Genre of Irish Squalor" by one critic) is one that never fails to attract an enthusiastic audience, especially an American...
...LONESOME WEST Martin McDonagh continues to astonish. The young London playwright's comedy drama about two brothers fighting over their father's money--the third of a trilogy that includes last season's The Beauty Queen of Leenane--plays at first like a Two Stooges farce. But the laughs thinly disguise a chilling picture of human nature at its nastiest and a rebuke to the romance of rural Ireland...
...McDonagh emphasized her stance by arguing that the abortion debate should not center around the issue of whether a fetus is a person...