Word: friel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Brian Friel is the Shakespeare of post-modernism. His plays, roaming the interstices between past and present, between perception and reality, between intention and result, preserve a captivating, comforting, cadenced poeticism. Beneath this refined and lyrical language, a bedlam of misguided passions and misconceived ideas rages all the more dramatically...
Like the Bard, Friel has warmed to the human condition as he develops as a playwright. His latest play, Dancing at Lughnasa, presents as different a perspective on the world from that of his first play, Faith Healer, as The Tempest does from Hamlet. The themes--of the ambiguity, uncertainty and misunderstanding that wrack our lives--endure. But in Dancing at Lughnasa, through the sordid banality and chaos, Friel strikes an indulgent, optimistic note...
...Friel implies this lighthearted gloss constitutes not a denial of the reality, but just as necessary a component. Indeed, he begs the question: isn't the perception just as, if not more, real than the reality? The sisters' uncle, Father Jack, embodies this sentiment. For 25 years, Father Jack worked as a Catholic missionary in Africa, earning himself a folk-hero status in the ardently religious community. Finally, his superiors send him home, ostensibly due to his poor health. But when he settles in with his nieces to recuperate, it gradually dawns on them that he was ejected from...
...season of high promises, broken: To such fallen stars as Brian Friel, Jule Styne and Frank Gilroy, add David Rabe (Streamers, Hurlyburly), whose own off-Broadway staging of his logy Those the River Keeps went down faster than a victim of the Mob hit men it portrayed...
Theater: After a hit with Lughnasa, Brian Friel flops...