Interview by Kilian Melloy
London-born playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh has won international acclaim for his work, with films like In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri to his credit, as well as stage works like The Pillowman, Hangmen, A Behanding in Seattle, and his two Ireland-set cycles. The Aran Islands trilogy comprises The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and The Banshees of Inisheer (which remains unpublished, though McDonagh did direct a film titled The Banshees of Inishirin). The Leenane Trilogy, set in and around County Galway, includes the Tony Award-nominated The Beauty Queen of Leenane, as well as A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West.
McDonagh has a knack for blending seriously dark subject matter with comedy, and that’s what he accomplishes in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which Theater UnCorked has chosen as its eighth season opener. Directed by Sheriden Thomas and featuring Parker Jennings, Sehnaz Dirik, Tim Hoover, and Peter Tone, the play centers on a mother and daughter whose dysfunctional dynamic makes Grey Gardens look like a sunny romp. Mag (Dirik) is a 70-ish woman entirely dependent on her 40-year-old unmarried daughter, Maureen (Jennings), who is close to overwhelmed with tending to her mother’s needs. Not having had a chance for love and marriage, Maureen has quietly carried a torch for the handsome Pato (Hoover), who has been working in England for years; when Pato’s brother Ray (Tony) stops by with an invitation for Maureen to attend a welcome home party for Pato, the alarmed Mag, worried she might lose her caretaker, starts scheming to ensure Maureen and Pato will never become involved. Things aren’t so easily derailed, though; Pato and Maureen begin to forge a relationship, forcing both Mag and Maureen into a spiral of increasing desperation and resentment.
Theater Mirror caught up with Theater UnCorked’s Producing Artistic Director Sehnaz Dirik and Sheriden Thomas, director of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, for a conversation about the play, its cast, and the trick of striking a balance between horror and hilarity.
Theater Mirror: Theater UnCorked has done all sorts of plays, including musicals, dramas, and comedies. How would you describe the company’s main focus?
Sehnaz Dirik: At Theater UnCorked, our main focus isn’t defined by a single genre. While we love switching between musicals, dramas, and comedies, our true anchor is producing bold, character-driven plots. For us, it’s about characters who feel like real, flawed people, and finding actors who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty playing them. We do this by bringing each story to life with a powerful blend of seasoned professionals and vibrant younger actors. By putting these two generations together on stage, we get this incredible mix of veteran wisdom and fresh, raw energy where everyone ends up learning from each other.
Theater Mirror: Martin McDonagh is among the most acclaimed contemporary playwrights. What, for you, is the draw to his work and to The Beauty Queen of Leenane in particular?
Sehnaz Dirik: What draws us to Martin McDonagh is that he writes exactly the kind of theater we live for: bold, uncompromising, and relentlessly character driven. He creates these profoundly flawed, incredibly real people who are just trying to survive each other. With The Beauty Queen of Leenane in particular, it’s a perfect vehicle for our casting philosophy. We get to put a seasoned veteran and a vibrant younger actor in a room together and let them find the dark humor, the deep-seated resentment, and the raw humanity in that toxic bond.
Theater Mirror: The Beauty Queen of Leenane has the hallmarks of a Martin McDonagh work — comedy mixed with some dark undercurrents, including romantic frustration, mental health issues, and intimations of elder abuse. What kind of balance are you looking to strike between the play’s levity and its horror?
Sheriden Thomas: The balance between levity and horror are right there in Martin’s play. His words and his situations provide a full expression of the cruelty and absurdity of being human. The kind of balance we are currently looking to maintain is the audience’s seeing that both Mag and Maureen do terrible things to each other, and yet for very good reasons. Life can be so hard that you gotta laugh.
Theater Mirror: The title itself seems to encapsulate the gap between our ideal lives and our real lives. In that, there’s plenty of both tragedy and comedy.
Sehnaz Dirik: You hit the nail on the head. That gap between what we want our lives to be and what they actually are is exactly where the comedy and the tragedy live in this show. Maureen wants the “ideal” romance and escape, but her “real” life is trapped in a rainy kitchen in Galway with her mother. When you put a seasoned professional and a younger actor on stage together playing this mother and daughter, that gap between the two lives becomes incredibly visceral. You see the wisdom — and the bitterness — of age colliding with the raw, desperate hope of youth, and that’s exactly where the magic of this play happens.
Theater Mirror: You play Mag in this production. What does it take in terms of makeup and costuming to transform into a 70-year-old woman who seems completely helpless?
Sehnaz Dirik: For Mag, everything starts with the hand. In a black box, the audience is right there with us, so that burnt scar tissue needs to look raw and lived-in. Her skin should have that grey, sickly paleness of someone who hasn’t stepped into the sun in years. The wardrobe does a lot of the heavy lifting. Drowning her in oversized layers instantly slumps her posture and makes her look tiny and helpless. Slapping on worn-out slippers and heavy wool socks instantly anchors her to the floor, forcing a shuffling walk. Every single step has to look like absolute agony. It’s all a calculation: She is weaponizing her own decay.
Theater Mirror: She’s not as helpless as she makes out to be, is she?
Sehnaz Dirik: In my opinion, Mag’s dependency is a beautifully calculated weapon, using her frailty as the perfect cage to keep Maureen trapped at home. Her helplessness is her full-time performance. If she admits she can do anything on her own, she loses her own leverage. She does have ailments, but she magnifies them the moment Maureen enters the room. It isn’t her failing body that terrifies her, but the prospect of being left utterly alone to rot in that cold, dark house. It’s all about guilting Maureen to stay. She whines and plays the “poor me” card, but the moment Maureen turns her back, Mag is razor-sharp!
Theater Mirror: McDonough’s two trilogies of Ireland-set plays are specific to regions — namely, County Galway and the Aran Islands. If you were to imagine him writing plays in the Boston area, where do you suppose he’d choose as settings?
Sheriden Thomas: Somerville for sure! Several in the cast live in Somerville and, because of Beauty Queen, have met more than once at The Burren, an Irish Pub in Davis Square. It has a grand community vibe with wonderful music, food, and people to meet.
Theater Mirror: The Theater UnCorked website announces that you’re now interviewing directors for next season and asks, “What are your favorites?” Do you start with the directors you’d like to work with and have them bring the programming, or are you looking to fit the tastes and talents of prospective directors to the plays you have in mind?
Sehnaz Dirik: For us, everything starts with collaboration. We are lucky to have a fantastic core group of directors we love working with, plus a growing number of new directors reaching out to join us. We then compare our dream list of shows with the projects our directors are genuinely passionate about directing. At the end of the day, we’ve found that the real secret to a successful production is matching the right story to our audience and then finding the perfect cast to bring it to life.
Theater Mirror: If you could produce anything you wanted, what would your dream season be like?
Sehnaz Dirik: Honestly, our dream season isn’t about specific titles. If we could do anything, my dream would be fiercely character-driven pieces where every single show feels like a masterclass in acting and the common thread would be those heavy-hitting, messy relationships on stage. Finding scripts that allow us to continue putting seasoned professionals right alongside raw, younger talent, giving both generations roles they can really sink their teeth into. If we can walk out of a season knowing we gave our actors space to do their best work and left our audience with stories they can’t stop talking about on the car ride home, that’s the ultimate dream.
The Beauty Queen on Leenane plays Nov. 12 – 22 at the Boston Center for the Arts Black Box Theatre. For tickets and more information go to https://www.theateruncorked.com/
