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Ed. note: This piece, by Mark E. Leib, will appear in this week’s issue of Creative Loafing.

The Banyan Theater Company is one of the best things that’s happened to Sarasota theater in the last 10 years, and its first production of the new summer season, Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, is just as impressive as area residents have come to expect. Featuring one stunning performance and another of top quality, Beauty Queen is a shattering look at filial hatred, desperate love, madness and missed chances. It shows us two flawed characters locked in a battle for survival, and two others whose innocent actions have a momentous effect on that life-or-death struggle. It’s funny, horrifying, surprising and suspenseful. It’s also proof that the writer of The Lieutenant of Innishmore and The Pillowman is one of the most important playwrights in the contemporary theater.

The story Beauty Queen tells is about vicious Maureen Folan, a 40-year-old virgin, and her nasty mother Mag, whose most urgent concern is keeping Maureen as her caretaker. Neither of these women is anyone’s idea of a dramatic heroine: Mag is clutching and devious and Maureen is spiteful, bad-tempered, and abusive — verbally and physically. Still, they’ve reached a sort of sadistic day-to-day equilibrium, and it would seem that they’ll go on hurting each other for years.

But then an intruder appears — Ray Dooley, a neighbor, with an invitation for Maureen to come to a party where Ray’s brother Pato, just back from England, will be the guest of honor. Mag does her best to keep Maureen from knowing about the party, but the younger woman finds out anyway, and goes off in a sexy new dress, bought just for the occasion. Next thing we know, it’s late in the evening, and Maureen and Pato are circling each other. He finds her sexually enchanting and she sees in him a possible escape from her dead-end life. With trepidation, he places his hands on her breasts, and she not only doesn’t spurn him, she asks him to stay, and to put his hands lower.

The next morning, Mag discovers that the worst has happened — a man has cohabited with her daughter — and threatens to divest her of her last servant/doormat (Maureen has two other sisters who are married and keep a safe distance). Mag cruelly informs Pato of a great embarrassment in Maureen’s past, hoping it’ll be enough to scare him away. But that’s just for starters. Soon another opportunity arises to interfere in the incipient love affair, and Mag’s just selfish and mean enough to grab at it. Will she destroy her daughter’s one shot at adult love? Or will wily Maureen find a way around her greedy mother and into Pato’s arms? And as long as we’re asking questions, does poor Pato have any idea of what kind of twisted, bitter soul lurks within the woman he blithely anoints “the beauty queen of Leenane”?

Jessica K. Peterson as that dubious beauty is nothing short of splendid. It was a year ago that she shone as Josie Hogan in Banyan’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, and she is every bit as brilliant in McDonagh’s play as she was in Eugene O’Neill’s. Peterson’s Maureen is so desperate for love that it’s painful. She’s also malevolent, vitriolic and violently dangerous to anyone that crosses her. It’s a testament to Peterson’s talent that we want her to find romance even though we know she’s a danger to anyone, randy or not, who gets too close to her volatile heart.

As clueless Pato, Derry Woodhouse is the perfect prey-who-thinks-himself-the-predator. He’s a sweet guy, honest and likable, and when he looks at Maureen he sees only an attractive face and a tantalizing figure. Unfortunately, Kim Crow as mother Mag isn’t quite on the level with these other performers. Mag should exude an evil resourcefulness, but Crow plays her with a stone-faced simplicity that’s ultimately reductive: We know she’s ruthless, but we can’t discern in her very much else. Gordon Myles Woods as Pato’s brother Ray also comes across as two-dimensional, but that seems to be the way McDonagh has written him. Aside from his impatience and short temper, there’s not much going on behind that blank forehead.

Gil Lazier directs cleverly, finding all the humor in this often wonderfully comic play but not holding back on the horror either. Jeffrey W. Dean’s set is a lovingly detailed cottage interior, featuring decades-old furniture, a small furnace, and a portrait of John and Robert Kennedy under a crucifix. I think that the play’s action suffers from the spaciousness of this environment, though: A closer room would better express the claustrophobic rut into which Maureen and Mag long ago fell. But Jaye Annette Sheldon’s costumes nicely suggest a lower-middle-class existence, and Steve Lemke’s sound design includes some lovely Irish music.

What’s most fascinating about The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the complexity of its characters, the mix of good and evil that we find so often in the world, but which so few contemporary dramatists manage to put in their plays. Maureen may be a venomous abuser, but she’s also legitimately in need of love, and a man who can please her, and a home of her own. Mag may be a calculating monster, but she’s also a needy old woman who’s been deserted by two of her daughters, and who worries for her life if she’s abandoned by the third. Even Pato, for all his goodness, is a complicated figure, one whose simple, healthy sex drive may be setting him up for a nightmare with a moral Gorgon. Author McDonagh puts us in the presence of these contradictory characters and then lets us decide for ourselves what to hope and fear. It’s not every playwright who sees human beings so capaciously. And it’s fewer who leave the ethical judgments up to the audience.

So see this fine play. It’s very funny, very chilling, and like nothing else you’ve witnessed. Kudos to Banyan for bringing it to Sarasota. And two more plays to go! The summer just got very interesting.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

4 stars

Runs through July 12, 8 p.m. July 1-3 and 7-11, and 2 p.m. July 1, 5 and 12, FSU Center for the Performing Arts, 5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, $28.50 and $8 for students, 552-1032 orbanyantheatercompany.com.

Photo by Gary Sweetman

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