Word: queenly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Admittedly, the plot line of The Beauty Queen of Leenane is not breathtakingly original. Set in the 1960s in the obscure village of Leenane in the county Connemara, it tells the story of a prototypical dysfunctional family. Maureen Folan is a forty-year-old woman stuck in a dismal job and still living with her mother in a tiny countryside shanty. Mag Folan is a crotchety 70 year old with a urinary infection and a nasty habit of emptying her bedpan in the dish sink. Maureen is offered a route of escape when Pato Dooley, a man of roughly...
...whatever cliches of class and setting McDonagh may help perpetuate in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, there is no denying the efficacy of his script and the tremendous complexity of his characters. And with compelling productions like Engel's to affirm the play's quality, the line at the box office will certainly not be slowing anytime soon...
...BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE...
...music in eight years. That's a lifetime in pop: time enough for the Seattle rock scene to have exploded like a supernova and to have collapsed like a white dwarf, time enough for Britney Spears to have gone from an innocent grade schooler to a stripteasing teen queen, time enough for the rap-rock genre to have bulked up its market muscle like a steroid-popping Bulgarian weight lifter. Time has passed, but it hasn't passed Sade by. Even when she's singing sad songs, even when she's just stretching her voice, she sounds as alluring...