It’s press release day:
North Carolina Stage Company, Asheville’s professional theatre, opens its 8th season with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the unsettling and bleakly funny play by Martin McDonagh that the New York Times calls “dizzying” and “both comic and ineffably sinister.” The Beauty Queen of Leenane runs October 21 – November 8 at North Carolina Stage Company in downtown Asheville, and stars Carol Mayo Jenkins, best known for her five-year stint on the TV show Fame.
The theatre is marking the opening of the play with a “Pay What You Can Night” Wednesday October 21st, sponsored by The Rankin Vault Cocktail Lounge. After the performance on the 21st, the audience is invited to walk over to the Vault at 7 Rankin Avenue and join NCSC for a “Beauty Queen” cocktail special.Living in a shabby, isolated cottage in the small Irish town of Leenane, Maureen and her elderly mother Mag spend their days in a vicious and funny game of one-upmanship. Their insular world is upset when the return of an old flame offers Maureen a glimpse of escape. McDonagh’s tightly plotted script balances moments of poignancy and hilarity as it builds towards an inevitable, unsettling conclusion.In Beauty Queen, Martin McDonagh combines the tense psychological drama of a Hitchcock thriller with the black comedy of a Coen brothers movie. When the play debuted on Broadway in 1998, the New York Times wrote “[McDonagh] has a master’s hand at building up and subverting expectations in a cat-and-mouse game with the audience, of seeming to follow a conventional formula and then standing it on its head. The play offers the satisfactions of a tautly drawn mystery…” The play went on to be nominated for a Tony Award, as well as winning several awards including the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards.The Beauty Queen of Leenane is directed by Angie Flynn-McIver and stars Carol Mayo Jenkins, Michael MacCauley, Casey Morris and Anne Thibault. Carol Mayo Jenkins is best known for playing Elizabeth Sherwood on the TV series Fame from 1982-1987, and is on faculty at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She is joined by Michael MacCauley, an Asheville-based actor who appeared most recently as The Player in NCSC’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Anne Thibault, who performed her one-woman show I Wrote This Play To Make You Love Me at NCSC in June and July. Casey Morris is a senior at UNC-Asheville making his professional debut with Beauty Queen.In addition to winning widespread acclaim for his plays, Irish playwright Martin McDonagh was the screenwriter and director of the Oscar-nominated In Bruges (2008) starring Colin Farrell.McDonagh is known for his tightly-plotted, mesmerizing writing, as well as the disturbing nature of his stories, which tend to be the blackest of black comedies. In a 2005 interview with the L.A. Times, McDonagh is quoted as saying “I’m more worried about boring people than offending them.”North Carolina Stage Company is Asheville’s professional non-profit theatre, presenting a year-round season of classic and contemporary plays, plus community-centered programs like the grassroots Catalyst Series and No Shame Theatre. Founded in 2001, NC Stage focuses on classic plays and the best of contemporary theatre: award-winning plays that are being presented on Broadway, off-Broadway and in regional theatres across the country. NC Stage has been named Best Local Stage Company by readers of the Mountain Xpress for four years in a row (2006 – 2009).For more information and a full calendar of events, visit www.ncstage.org or call (828) 239-0263.