Martin McDonagh loves extracting laughs from darkness.
And his audiences love to embrace those lighter moments — when they’re not cringing, that is.
It figures, then, that the Marin Theatre Company has done its damnedest to shed some light on The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which was the Irish wordsmith’s first hit play in 1996.
Light isn’t this production’s problem, though. It’s auditory — multi-leveled.
Dialect coach Lynne Soffer honed the actors’ brogues so well they’d likely be considered authentic in Dublin. But in Mill Valley they require excessive time to decipher.
Making the decoding even tougher is the off-putting ambient noise on stage — from a squawky radio and a “telly” that’s often on.
The result — especially when you add in the four-member cast being mic-less, as well as hastily spoken dialogue — is that more than a few theatergoers left opening night griping about not being able to hear.
Or understand.
And that doesn’t count folks in seats on the right side who objected to characters either facing the rear of the stage or away from them too much.
Hearing-impaired men and women who used defective MTC house headphones voiced even more dismay.
The four actors were game, and extremely capable: Joy Carlin as Mag Folan, a manipulative, selfish, passive-aggressive 70-year-old; Beth Wilmurt as Maureen, her bitter, mentally ill 40-year-old daughter; Rod Gnapp as Pato Dooley, Maureen’s awkward, tentative suitor; and Joseph Salazar as Ray, Pato’s brother who’s clearly not the hottest poker in the wood stove.
They excelled as McDonagh and director Mark Jackson unhurriedly built tension and suspense via secrets and lies, retaliation and retribution, twists and turns, all the while enmeshing the audience in a web of illusion vs. reality.
That made it almost impossible not to become engrossed in the sardonic repartee between mother and daughter.
Yet those pesky sound issues…
Which hopefully can be ameliorated in subsequent performances.
A massive upside is that McDonagh has an awe-inspiring way with words, making them frequently jump out in italics, whether they’re barbs emanating from the daughter (calling Mag a stupid bitch who’ll “hang on forever — just to spite me”) or mother (describing Maureen as a nut case and harping on the 40-year-old’s virginity), or the steady laughter invoked by a Pato monologue or a set piece at the kitchen sink.
Some may consider a grisly Act II deed (after a gradient first act) unspeakable, so it’s probably best for me to remain silent about it except to say it can’t equal the horrors McDonagh offered in his latter-day tour de force, “The Pillowman.”
I saw that play years back at the Berkeley Rep, where McDonagh’s brilliance coerced me into laughing.
And cringing.
He coerced my wife, decidedly more squeamish at that gruesome, nightmarish delineation of child abuse, rape, murder and crucifixion, into leaving midway through.
Comparatively, the 105-minute Beauty Queen — the first segment of his “Leenane Trilogy,” thinly related tales of Irish villagers — is exceptionally tame.
It’s easily verified that the playwright’s precursors are neither James Joyce nor Shakespeare but David Mamet and, possibly, Quentin Tarantino (although McDonagh vehemently demurs).
The London-born, British-based writer, a school dropout at 16, is nevertheless judged to be one of the great modern Irish playwrights. He has long believed theatrical dramas a means to an end, that end being feature-filmmaking — a goal he achieved in 2008 with “In Bruges,” which I enjoyed, and last year’s “Seven Psychopaths,” which I’ve missed so far.
McDonagh clearly revels in toying with life’s underbelly and depravities, specializing in fairy tale-like cruelty and blood, and he hopes you and I will buy into his horror-humor agenda.
Ultimately, we may indeed marvel at his work and laugh uproariously, or we might eventually find we can no longer stomach his histrionics and over-the-topness, similar to growing weary of Sarah Silverman’s shocking comic routines.
This time around, my elevated expectations weren’t met.
So I was disappointed.
My wife, meanwhile, didn’t run for cover — but I’m sure she’d have preferred to leave at intermission.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane runs at the Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through June 16. Night shows, 8 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays through Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 7 p.m. Sundays,. Matinees, 1 p.m. Thursdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $15 to $57. Information: (415) 388-5208 or www.marintheatre.org.
