The Madelyn Trilogy
By Beau O’Reilly
A trilogy of plays by O’Reilly about the McGuffin family (Hitchcock fans take note), a sextet of troubled siblings. “Madelyn Dangles the Noose”, “The McGuffins Run the 440”, and “Hitting the Bricks”
Praise for Madelyn Dangles the Noose:
A good script can withstand all odds, though… 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… 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. 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.
Praise for "The McGuffins Run the 440
It’s a hilarious, disarmingly poignant melee… The spare, efficient The McGuffins Run the 440 is nearly perfect, however. 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… The language is impeccable, and almost everything rings profoundly true. I can’t recall a more satisfying two and a half hours I’ve had in the theater, even though the actors were routinely wandering out of the light and losing their places in the script.
Praise for Hitting the Bricks
The final play, Hitting the Bricks, veers toward absurdism… . I spent three hours wondering which way was up. But after all those hours on my feet in a dark room surrounded by exhausted actors, with only a greasy ham-and-cheese deluxe to sustain me, The Little Engine That Could might have seemed hopelessly enigmatic.