By Joseph Hurley
Far from the image she projects as Mag Folan, the crusty old battlewagon she plays in Martin McDonagh’s multiple-Tony-Award-winning play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” Dublin stage veteran Anna Manahan seems delicate to the point of fragility.
For an actress built along ample, even heroic, lines, and who has made something of a speciality of playing formidable, powerful women, including the title role in John B. Keane’s “Big Maggie,” a part the County Kerry playwright wrote with her in mind, Manahan comes over as gentle, her well-modulated voice so soft that at times it becomes difficult to hear.
Not so on stage, where last week she won a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role as Mag, the ratchet-toned old crone whose wheedling complaints Manahan projects with seeming effortlessness, every growl and every subtlety easily audible in the theater’s last row. In all, McDonagh’s ink-dark comedy won four Tonys.
The part of Mag Folan, the wily Connemara termagant ruling over the empty, arid life of her 40-year-old spinster daughter, Maureen, wasn’t specifically written for Manahan, although, viewed in another way, it actually may well have been intended for her from the start.
The 27-year-old McDonagh, London-born and Irish-derived, is a notorious television viewer, and it appears he remembered Manahan after seeing her performance in the successful series “The Irish RM.”
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The actress is hesitant to suggest that Mag was written for her because she knows that McDonagh knew very little about the theater when he started writing, and “Beauty Queen” was, in fact, his first play.
“He’d seen very few plays, so when he wrote this one, he didn’t know anybody in the acting fraternity,” she said. “When Garry Hynes, our director, asked if there was anyone he had in mind, he apparently said, ‘Well, there’s a woman I saw on television playing Mrs. Cadagawn, and I’d like her for Mag.’ Garry told him, ‘That’s funny, because that’s who I was thinking of as well.’ So, in a sense, he knew who I was, but he couldn’t give a name to me, except that he knew my work.”
Although she has worked in virtually all of her country’s major theaters, the Druid Theatre of Galway has dominated Anna Manahan’s professional life since Feb. 1, 1996, when “Beauty Queen” opened and put McDonagh on the map as a playwright to watch. Since then, the play has been done twice in London, revived in Galway, and sent on tours around Ireland. Sometimes it is done by itself and sometimes with the two plays, “A Skull in Connemara” and “The Lonesome West,” which make up what has come to be known as “The Leenane Trilogy.”
Manahan has always loved doing the plays, but there is one Irish tour which she remembers with perhaps a particular fondness. “We went to the islands around Ireland,” she said, “and it was very special, because I’d never been to the islands before. We played Clare Island, off Cork. We played the three Aran Islands, Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer. We played Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast in the six counties, and we played Aranmoor, and then some of the smaller coastal towns.”
Some of those towns, and particularly the islands, gave the actress an experience she’d never had before. “It was amazing,” she recalled. “Sometimes we’d play in little halls that were nothing more than two little houses stuck together. There’d be a turf fire with people sitting on the floor and on benches. In the firelight, there was real magic, and you felt the play was where it should be.”
Since Anna Manahan was very much on the scene when Martin McDonagh’s now legendary career was just beginning, she had strong feelings about the young playwright. “He’s an extraordinary young man,” she said. “He rose like a comet over the theatrical scene.” That counts as something of an understatement, considering there were four McDonagh plays on London stages at the same time at one point, specifically the three parts of the trilogy and “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” which had its New York premiere at the Public Theatre last April.
Play’s universal appeal
Wherever she’s played miserable old Mag Folan, Manahan has found audience reaction virtually identical. “It’s a strange thing about this play,” she said, “that it has a kind of universal appeal. Some things strike slightly different chords one place or another, as though some references might be more familiar to one audience than to another, but, generally speaking, it’s the same. We thought when we went to London that we’d be playing before a very sophisticated West End kind of audience and that they might not react, but they did. They reacted the very same way as people had in the islands. And they’re doing the same thing here in New York too.”
The actress said she thinks she knows the reason for the uniformity of audience reaction to “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.” “It’s because Martin is a born storyteller,” she said. “That’s what he said he wanted to do, to write stories. He thinks the theater has become too psychological, and it may be that people want to hear stories and see characters.”
Manahan agrees with McDonagh. “I think that’s the great appeal of this play,” she said. “And then, of course, the mother-and-daughter relationship is universal and everybody can understand it. This one, of course, is terribly obsessive and wrong, but everyone can relate to it, on one level or another.”
There were slight differences from audience to audience, the actress admitted. “In the smaller places,” she said, “the more rural places, the reaction was often instantaneous, and not only on a kind of primitive level, it was absolutely based in an understanding of the people. On some of the islands, it was clear that everyone was there, from children to young people to old people, and they’d all get to their feet at the end in a kind of ovation. And they don’t know anything about standing ovations in the theatrical sense. That’s not what they were doing. They were simply saying ‘thank you for coming, and won’t you please come back to us again.’ ”
The actress has played in the New York theater only once before, when she appeared with Art Carney in Brian Friel’s “Lovers,” a pair of plays entitled, respectively, “Winners and Losers.” Manahan appeared in the second play only, in a plot which resembles a kind of comic inversion of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” as a spinster who does, in fact, land a man. Manahan’s performance won her a Tony Nomination.
“I loved doing that,” she said. “Lovers” opened at Lincoln Center and then moved to Broadway, which is what “Beauty Queen” will be doing in a few weeks.
In the years since the Friel play, Manahan has made infrequent trips to New York. “I played in a Carnegie Hall celebration in 1976,” she said, “in a program called ‘The Best of Ireland.’ And I toured with Gemini Productions in a play called ‘I Do Not Like thee, Dr. Fell.’ ”
And then, for a time, there was a one-woman show the actress used to tour to universities and colleges. “I don’t do that anymore,” she said. “I used to go to places like Harvard and Boston College, but it was a period of my life, and I’ve given it up now. I also played in New Jersey at one point in a play by John B. Keane called ‘Moll.’ I was a priest’s housekeeper. That was with a group called the Celtic Players.”
The actress has consciously cut her schedule down from what it once was. “I need a rest,” she said. “My schedule has been busy the last several years – too busy, in fact. I’ve been away from my home too much, and I’ve been traveling too much. I’ve been in London a lot, and I’ve been touring Ireland and I don’t seem to get much time at home.”
Manahan, who lived in Dublin for much of her career, has returned to Waterford. “Three years ago,” she said, “I moved back to my native Waterford. I’m a widow, and I don’t have any children, but I have very close brothers and sisters.”
A kind of subtle sadness steals into Manahan’s soft, gentle voice when she talks of family manners. “I was only 10 months married to Colum O’Kelly, the Gate Theatre stage manager, when he went on a Gate tour, which included Egypt,” she said. “He contracted polio and died. The year was 1956.”
The actress banishes the slight sorrow that has crossed her face, moving it away as if by an act of will. “I have a marvelous wider family now, you know,” she said, as if to dispel the touch of regret that had entered the conversation, as if she wanted to say, “I’m not complaining.”