Word: friel
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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...
...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...
...Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa dominated the 1992 Tony awards and this season will be the most produced play in the U.S., with at least 16 major regional stagings. The arrival of his new Wonderful Tennessee was a major Broadway event. Alas, so was its departure at week's end. A lesser work than Lughnasa, it failed because it is also a bleaker one. While Lughnasa portrayed in poignant detail the hard times of the five Mundy sisters in rural Ireland in 1937 and foreshadowed still worse things to befall them, the dominant memory it left...