Age before beauty

The stage was set like an old fashioned living room with a rocking chair April 14 and 15 in Russell Auditorium for the play “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a dark tragicomedy. The central theme is around an old Irish mother, Caroline Horlacher, trying to keep her daughter, Lauren Adel, from entering her last chance at a relationship. Elisha Hodgin, a senior theater major and director of the play, decided a year ago that she wanted to be a part of the play.

“I was told that it had to be an international play and I read about 10 different plays,” Hodgin said. “I read another play by Martin McDonough and I liked his style, then I found this one and I loved it, I proposed it, and the Capstone directors said yes.”

Hodgin actively took part in every aspect of the play, from the prop selections to arranging meetings with dialogue coaches to give the play an authentic Irish feel.

“The cast took to it really well; better than I thought they would,” Hodgin said. “After the first two weeks we probably had the dialect down.”

Accents were not the only change the actors had to adapt to. Caroline Horlacher, a senior theater major who played the aging mother Mag Falon in the play, said she found getting into character more demanding than she expected.

“It was really difficult staying bent over the whole time, but it was just a fun part. It was a little tiring, but it’s worth it,” Horlacher said.

In the play, Horlacher was either found sitting in her rocking chair asking favors of her middle-aged daughter or shuffling half bent over to confiscate her daughter’s love letters while she was not looking.

Lauren Adel, a junior theater major who played the daughter Maureen Falon, and Zane Wind, a senior mass communication major who played Maureen’s love interest Pato Dooley, said they were challenged much like Horlacher was.

“There were two big monologues done by Zane and Lauren,” Horlacher said. “They both did a great job.”

The final character, Ray Dooley, the brother of Pato, played by freshman theater major John Underwood, acted as the informant to the women of the outside world which led to many of the main plot turns of the play.

Destiny Andrews, a junior theater major, was the lighting designer for the play. She said she wanted to set a bleak tone in each scene.

“With this play it’s very real, so you have to keep things realistic,” Andrews said. “We are using LED, so the lights are so bright.”

After four weeks of rehearsals full audiences honored the hard work of the directors and actors each night.

“You always want to do more and work on more, but I’m really happy with the work they have done in the time that we have,” Hodgin said.

Posted by Joanna Sullivan on Apr 23 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry