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review News flash: August Wilson has a brother living in Ireland. Or maybe a nephew of sorts. Or at least an artistic next-of-kin. His name is Martin McDonagh, he’s a playwright just turned 30, and he’s the hottest Irish export since Guinness Stout. And yes, he lives up to all the hype; he’s a great writer, and a rip-roaring storyteller. You can hear his compelling voice in the dark comedy-drama "The Beauty Queen of Leenane", now in its Southern California premiere at South Coast Repertory. It’s an American production of an Irish play, and predictably, it’s a qualified success. (Most American productions of Irish plays are just that; if the accents don’t cause a cast trouble, the emotional demand will.) Andrew J. Robinson’s staging starts at "good" but seldom approaches "great." Still, you’ll like what you see. "Leenane" is essentially a power struggle between a mother and a daughter set in poor rural Ireland. Spinster Maureen (Heather Ehlers) is the angry, frumpy caregiver to 70-year-old Mag (Ann Gee Byrd), a cranky yet colorful hag plagued by a nasty temper and a urinary tract infection. It’s a love-hate story, funny and sad. Maureen is 40, and she’s never fallen in love; Mag doesn’t want her to, for if she meets a man she’ll surely leave her and Connemara, never to return. And that’s exactly what begins to happen: Pato (Tim Murphy), a good and honest man bound for a construction job in England, sees something special in Maureen at last. His little brother Ray (Rob King) becomes an unwitting conduit to a set of circumstances that will change all their lives. Does this sound like an old story? It is. But it’s quite a moving one. If "Leenane" is typical of what McDonagh's plays are like, the more of his work we see, the better. About 60% of the time, his characters bicker over trivial things in an immensely funny way; you get a really good laugh about every fifth line. And for the remaining 40%, he has his characters speak directly from the heart –- not loudly and cloyingly, but softly and true. Yes, sometimes you can see what’s coming. But when it comes, it’s totally unsentimental. Now, Andrew J. Robinson is perhaps the best unsung director in California theatre. (Yes, he’s won Ovation and LADCC awards, but his name seldom rings a bell like a Lisa Peterson or a Danny Scheie.) Robinson’s done great work at the Matrix Theatre Co.; he directed its outstanding productions of "Yield of the Long Bond", "Endgame" and "Waiting for Godot". Given his Beckett background, it’s not surprising that he sets the perfect pace for McDonagh’s rancorous Act 1 small talk. But the two key dramatic moments in Act 2 -– the moments that were by all accounts heartwrenching in the New York production -– here feel wasted and truncated. But I’d give Robinson’s direction an 85 out of 100, and that’s still pretty high. While I’m lapsing into numbers, I’d give 75 out of 100 to the cast. Ehlers and Byrd are both magnificent -– in fact, you almost want them to do the whole play. I’d swear Ehlers was born and raised in County Galway; her accent is perfect, and when she hurts, you feel it in row three. Byrd is also on pitch and suitably rough and ragged in an assemblage of stained and filthy outfits. And I fell in love with Murphy, who hails from Ireland and who plays Pato with his heart gently on his sleeve. The weak link is King -– his attempt at an Irish accent is terrible, and while his occasional hyperactivity is funny, it can’t repeal his inauthenticity. (His passing resemblance to Adam Sandler doesn’t exactly help.) "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" has many faces. It’s a comedy, and you find it’s also a moving drama. It seems obvious, but it’s actually psychologically complex. And at the end, you may not know whom to root for. It’s just a damn good story. And it really does remind you of August Wilson. Wilson tells stories of marginalized-yet-proud people with an incredible linguistic flair and a keen eye for the slow disintegration of human relationships; so does McDonagh. And both playwrights are straight-to-the-point storytellers – no prisms, no broken structure, no pretension for these guys. They simply let their characters speak and let the plot rip. As New York Daily News drama critic Fintan O’Toole wrote in 1998 in regards to McDonagh, Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr and similar young Irish playwrights: "For all their playfulness, they are making adept use of elements that seem to have been left behind by the theatrical avant-garde – literary language and a strong narrative drive...Now, perhaps, the most countercultural things a playwright can do are to use dense verbal language and to tell a coherent story." And that’s what McDonagh does expertly. If it’s not art, it’s pretty close. And if this South Coast Repertory production isn’t great, it’s still really good. "The Beauty Queen
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