Word: lughnasa
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Scheduled to open on Broadway in less than a month, Brian Friel's Translations hopes to follow the success of his Tony Award-winning Dancing at Lughnasa. But the Boston production touches the shallowest of emotions, proving once again that star-power does not necessarily translate into outstanding theater...
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...
...that respect, the Law School's production fall short of the text. For director Dana Kirchman presents Dancing at Lughnasa as a sort of Irish Decline and Fall: a tragicomic descent from the sublime to the ridiculous. But Friel's play follows no such forced structure. The tragedy and the comedy are both equally present and equally real from the beginning. Indeed, what is disturbing about Dancing at Lughnasa is not the depressing tale of the Mundys' decline; rather it is the slapdash casserole of elation and despair that makes up their everday lives...
Theater: After a hit with Lughnasa, Brian Friel flops...
Tennessee is a variation on Lughnasa's themes: the intertwining of pagan and ) Christian traditions, the virtues and dangers of connecting with one's animal self, loneliness within family and marriage, the paralyzing loss of certainty in the modern world. But in Lughnasa themes emerged organically from storytelling. In Tennessee they are often clumsily declaimed. Moreover, the Dublin-derived ensemble did not create the illusion of long familiarity that the once-in-a-lifetime Lughnasa troupe did. As a bookie who plays sugar daddy to all the other characters, marvelous Donal McCann brought himself to feckless ruin with a crooked...