Three Full-Length Plays by Beau O'Reilly
August 23 – October 28, 2007
Part of the 19th Annual Rhinoceros Theater Festival
I. Madelyn Dangles the Noose
directed by Beau O'Reilly
The six McGuffin children, all in their increasingly eccentric 40s, are pulled together by the suicide of Madelyn Glass, the hard-living ex-wife of two of the brothers. Michael goes crazy; Peaches wants to date everybody. It will take the strength of all other McGuffins to take Madelyn through her funeral.
II. The McGuffins Run the 440
directed by Jayita Bhattacharya
Michael is living on the beach after biting a man in the face. Joan has become a performance artist using images from the birth of her siblings. Turnow and Jobey try to come to terms ethically with having their brother committed. And Moth thinks there might be a god and wouldn't that be interesting; not to mention long-lost McGuffin father “Frank the Flame” has everybody doing windsprints on the beach.
III. Hitting the Bricks
directed by Scott Barsotti
A few McGuffin years have passed, and everyone moved to the big city. Michael—now Rampar—healed himself by drinking massive amounts of coffee and is now a performance artist who hangs off of impossibly high things. His sister Moth ran for mayor and won; practical brother Jobey's slacker son blew up a Starbucks; Michael's awful son Patty O. Patty started his own show; and Turnow works as a slapper for DIAL-A-SLAP.
O'Reilly has a unique feeling for the weird yet lyrical: he steps outside the bounds of reality yet remains within the confines of the human heart. In the opening scene of Madelyn Dangles the Noose, the lights come up on a woman in an upstage corner standing before a table covered with prescription bottles. Swigging champagne, she berates an ex-lover on her cell phone, then hangs up on him and cackles, "Cock like an elephant. Never forgets." After failing to slit her throat with a butter knife, she tries her hand at a suicide note. "Dear friends, you have been everything to me," she dictates to no one. "And that's not much."
This drunken heap of giddy misanthropy—she calls children "solipsistic mongrels" and religion "paternalistic vomit"—is Madelyn. Her ultimately successful suicide attempt is what brings members of the fractured, eccentric McGuffin clan into toxic proximity, first in Madelyn Dangles the Noose and for years to come in the second and third plays. In a cheeky subversion of the American family drama, the McGuffins aren't her family but her in-laws—her own family can't stand her. Madelyn is the ex-wife of two brothers: hulking, uncommunicative Michael McGuffin, crippled by the dissolution of their marriage 20 years earlier, and career lothario Peaches McGuffin, who dallied with Madelyn for two months before blithely moving on to his next conquest.
News of Madelyn's demise is delivered in a series of finely tuned two-person scenes in the first act of Madelyn Dangles the Noose. These introduce the six McGuffin siblings: not only Michael and Peaches but practical Joan, uptight brother Jobey, brazen sister Turnow, and inquisitive sister Moth. The first onstage is Joan, who gets the call while she's with her needy lover, Freddie. The second is Peaches, in bed with yet another woman. Madelyn's death interrupts both their stumbling attempts to find love: Joan gives up trying to placate Freddie and Peaches gives up trying to remember the name of the woman beside him. Throughout this play and the next, The McGuffins Run the 440, O'Reilly explores myriad interruptions to love: death, despair, ennui, art, egotism, career, cowardice, inattention. And how, after enough interruptions, it settles into something akin to habit.
After introducing all the main characters, O'Reilly brings everyone together for Madelyn's funeral in act two of Madelyn Dangles the Noose. It's a hilarious, disarmingly poignant melee: the siblings sing Madelyn's favorite song (about an absentminded mother washing her new baby down the drain), and the ghost of the deceased gleefully bellows vitriol into the ear of the long-suffering reverend....
The spare, efficient The McGuffins Run the 440 is nearly perfect.... Over two and a half hours, in mostly two-person scenes, O'Reilly weaves an intricate portrait of a family coming apart at the seams.... I can't recall a more satisfying two and a half hours I've had in the theater.—Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader
The Madelyn Trilogy was performed by Teresa Weed, Sarah Gitenstein, Troy Martin, Steve Lehman, Bridget O'Reilly, Vicki Walden, H.B. Ward, John Starrs, Jenny Magnus, Jessica Wright, Max Greenberg, Adam Rosenberg, Erin Pakowski, Casey Cunningham, Vernon Tonges, Anne Calcagno, Rory Jobst, Mitchell Salm, Scott Barsotti, Megan Larmer, Matt Rieger, Matt Test, Thomas Hodge, Winifred O'Reilly, Sue Cargill, Beth Ann O'Reilly, Danne Taylor, Kate Teichman, Debbie Safeblade, Beau O'Reilly and Jeffrey Bivens
Steve, Bridget, Troy, Teresa, Vicki and H.B. as the McGuffin siblings in a scene from Madelyn Dangles the Noose
Jenny, H.B. and ensemble in a scene from Madelyn Dangles the Noose
H.B. and Troy as brothers Michael and Peaches in a scene from The McGuffins Run the 440
When we moved the entire trilogy to the Irish American Heritage Center, Jeff couldn't help taking along his video camera.
