THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE Runs 5/23-6/16 in Mill Valley

Marin Theatre Company closes its 2012-13 Season with a revival of Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane in Mill Valley from May 23 to June 16. Named San Francisco Chronicle's MVP of 2012 Bay Area theater, Mark Jackson (Shotgun Players, Aurora Theater Company) directs this "gloriously funny; wickedly amusing; unalloyed delight" (The Telegraph). Opening night is on Tuesday, May 28.

"I'm delighted to finally have local director Mark Jackson bring his unique vision to MTC," artistic director Jasson Minadakis said. "Mark and I have been talking for quite a while about finding the right project to introduce his aesthetic to our audiences and I know Martin McDonagh's searingly funny The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the perfect vehicle. This is the play that launched McDonagh's career as one of Ireland's most important contemporary writers. It is also the third play we have explored this season that marks a seminal point in modern theater. The others were Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, the first Pulitzer winner by a black female playwright, and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, considered by many to be the most important play of the 20th century."

"Perhaps the best Irish play of the last 20 years" (Chicago Tribune), The Beauty Queen of Leenane premiered at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, Ireland, in October 1996 as part of a touring production by the Druid Theatre Company that traveled through Ireland to London's West End and later to Australia. The Druid production also went on to have successful runs Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company and on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater in 1998, winning that year's Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, Drama League Award for Best Play and Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Broadway Play. Recently, the Young Vic Theatre staged a highly regarded production in London and Dublin in 2010 and 2011. The play has been produced locally at Berkeley Rep in 1999, San Jose Stage in 2002 and Northside Theatre Company in San Jose in 2012.

Written when the playwright was 27, The Beauty Queen of Leenane was Martin McDonagh's break out hit. He went on to write A Skull in Connemara (1997), The Lonesome West (1997), The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), The Pillowman (2003) and A Behanding in Spokane (2010), as well as the films In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012). He won an Academy Award for the short Six Shooter, a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for In Bruges and Laurence Olivier Awards for The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman. While often compared to Quentin Tarantino - which McDonagh does not welcome, saying "there's a moral conundrum to both of my films that I haven't really seen in Tarantino's for a while" (New York Times) - the Irish writer is known for his distinctive voice: his "gift for extended gags, seemingly innocuous scraps of dialogue building up to savagely ironic punchlines, and sly, sadistic details that are unnecessary, appalling, yet curiously entertaining" (The Guardian). Most recently, his work has been produced in the Bay Area at SF Playhouse (Behanding in Spokane, 2012), Cal Performances (Druid Theatre Company's touring production of The Cripple of Inishmaan, 2011), Berkeley Rep (The Lieutenant of Inishmore, 2009) and San Jose Stage (The Pillowman, 2009).

MTC's production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane features the MTC debut of Bay Area director Mark Jackson. Named best director in 2009 and 2004 by East Bay Express, best theatrical auteur in 2007 by SF Weekly and among the top 100 Bay Area artists in 2002 by San Francisco Magazine, he was the San Francisco Chronicle's MVP of 2012 Bay Area theater, with theater critic Robert Hurwitt writing, "every show is exhilarating in its intellectual challenges, sharp visual images and expressive physical acting, and every year at least one of his shows makes my Top 20 list." His directorial work was most recently seen at Aurora Theatre Company in The Arsonists and Salomania, which he also wrote, and at Shotgun Players in Woyzeck and God's Plot, which he also wrote.

MTC's production also features a cast of local actors, including returning MTC veterans Joy Carlin (Misalliance, My Old Lady) and Rod Gnapp (Edward Albee's Tiny Alice, Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, Frozen), as well as the debuts of Joseph Salazar and Beth Wilmurt, who were both most recently seen at Shotgun Players.

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