My soul today is heaven on earth / O could the transport last,'” sing two women at the end of the first scene of Brian Friel’s recent play, Wonderful Tennessee. And in answer to the question posed in the hymn, one wants to shout – as Angela, one of the play’s six mortality-haunted characters, will later in the play – “Yes, Yes, Yes!” Now 64, the Irish dramatist has devoted his astonishing career to moments of “transport” sure to number among the lasting achievements of contemporary drama.
This year in the US., those achievements are finding their broadest exposure yet. Dancing at Lughnasa, Friel’s 1990 memory play whose accumulated laurels include a Best Play Olivier award in London and three Tony awards, is the most widely produced script in the American regional theatre this season, according to its Broadway producer, Noel Pearson. (At least 24 productions will have been seen by season’s end, including three playing this month in Alabama, Minnesota and Wisconsin.)
On April 12, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn. starts a month-long engagement of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin’s extraordinary production of Faith Healer, with the same trio of actors that galvanized London’s Royal Court Theatre two years ago: Donal McCann, Sinead Cusack and Ron Cook. In August, that show’s director, Joe Dowling, makes his Roundabout Theatre debut in New York with a revival of Philadelphia, Here I Come! (through Oct. 2), the play that first introduced Broadway audiences to Friel nearly 30 years ago. In 1995, Pearson plans to produce a revival of Translations, under the direction of Robin Lefevre, on Broadway.
“We were always balanced somewhere between the absurd and the momentous,” comments an earlier Frank the itinerant con man at the heart of Faith Healer, arguably Friel’s greatest play, as well as his most structurally dense and challenging. Friel’s plays, in fact, inhabit exactly that point “somewhere between.” He tells of lives spent on the threshold of epiphany, of people who, like the kindred Franks in these plays, are thrown back on the often grotesque absurdity of their own condition. (Such is doubly the case in Faith Healer whose voluble hero owe ultimately discover – speaking from beyond the grave.)
Epiphanies arrive, but Friel insists we take from them not the “momentous” occassio ns themselves but their lingering after-effects. In Dancing at Lughnasa, the blazing revel of the title comes not at any natural point of climax but midway through Act 1, as the five spinsterish Mundy sisters find release from working-class drudgery one summer day in 1936 in a Dionysiac outburst common to Friel’s work. (In Faith Healer, Frank signposts an authorial leitmotif at the end of his first monologue, recalling “A Dionysian night. A Bacchanalian night. A frenzied, excessive Irish night when ritual was consciously and relentlessly debauched.”)
Some argue that Lughnasa errs in playing its titular card so early, but surely the play’s true dance lies elsewhere: in the “hypnotic movements” accompanying the surrender of “to be in touch with some otherness” which the narrator Michael, an authorial alter ego gently write large, speaks wistfully of in his closing soliloquy. Similarly, Wonderful Tennessee might seem to peak too early in the cancerous George’s ferocious accordion rendition of the “Moonlight Sonata” played, his wife Trish says, as if he were “afraid to stop.”
But Friel fearlessly plunges ahead, allowing the reflective silence following George’s recital to inform every moment of the play thereafter. Otherness is this play’s theme, too – specifically so, since its characters are all trying to get to one Oilean Draiochta, the so-called Island of Otherness, Island of Mystery – and it is essential to Friel’s method that these ecstatic bursts hover as a link between the pagan, the aesthetic and the transcendental making a nonsense of formal religion. (Not for nothing did Friel abandon teenage aspirations to the priesthood.) This dramatist writes metaphysical mood pieces not showstoppers, and his most haunting passages lie in his characters’ inevitable reacquaintance with this world even as they acknowledge, usually silently, the next.
Unlike Beckett, Friel always conjures a recognizable landscape, forgoing – so far, anyway – full-throttle abstraction in favor of his beloved Ballybeg (literally baile beag, or “small town”). Philadelphia, Here I Come!, his first major play – which followed several short stories and radio pieces – deals directly with the temptations of travel in its portrait of the 25-year-old Gareth nervously anticipating his departure for America the next day. Presumably, it’s no accident that the play was written upon Friel’s return to Ireland from a six-month American sojourn in 1963 at the Guthrie Theatre, where he apprenticed himself to the playhouse’s namesake.
In a device drawn from Eugene O’Neill and subsequently used in such disparate contexts as Sarah Daniels’s Beside Herself, Marsha Norman’s Getting Out and A. R. Gurney’s Sweet Sue, among others, Friel filters his own debate with himself through two halves of the same whole. Known as Public and Private Gar, the characters embody a conscience in conflict, which must choose whether or not to renounce the “bloody quagmire, backwater, dead end” defined as Ballybeg.
His life since shows the result of that internal debate. Friel, whose fictional community encompasses universal yearnings (his own often-stated analogy for it is Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County), departs from Ballybeg only in more didactic works: The Freedom of the City (1973), for example, about three hapless demonstrators holed up in Derry’s Guildhall; or the static Making History (1988), which roots Ireland’s ongoing “troubles” in the story of tribal chieftain Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who led a thwarted Ulster resistance against Queen Elizabeth I in the 1590s before fleeing to Italy.
Translations, Friel’s most liberatingly political play to date, weds fictive characters to a real historical phenomenon: the 19th-century re-naming of Celtic places into English. The result is both a wrenching love story and a dissection of a peculiarly Irish schizophrenia; the play maps a country’s psyche as swiftly as the visiting British lieutenants map the terrain, translating into their own words a waning language and culture that won’t be lost without a fight and yet, the play suggests, must on some level give way.
Translations marked a turning point for Friel as the inaugural production of Field Day, the Derry-based company founded in 1980 by Friel and actor Stephen Rea (of The Crying Game fame) to tour one play annually throughout Ireland, forging a cultural identity for the country independent both of Britain and Irish nationalist of dogma. “I feel I don’t ever want to write about politics, but sometimes it happens,” the author told me several years back, and it’s instructive to note that it took the move away from Field Day – he gave Lughnasa to the Abbey, not Field Day, much to Rea’s continuing chagrin – to spark his current creative foment. The company has since been all but disbanded inasmuch as its board members, poets Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane among them are actively engaged elsewhere, as is the suddenly starry Rea.
Well into his seventh decade, Friel is writing with an ever more personal urgency, translating a young man’s dilemma in Philadelphia! into an older man’s ruminations about the life gone before and the afterlife, or not, that awaits. Patrick Mason, the inestimable director of Friel’s last two Broadway ventures, hails the playwright’s regeneration: “There hasn’t been anything like it in the literary life of this country since Yeats and that amazing blossoming of the late poems.” And yet, while the director warns against “trying to identify specific autobiographical elements,” Mason’s own clear-eyed productions clarify Friel’s current obsessions.
In a sense, they are what they always were; one notes as many similarities as differences between the writer of Philadelphia! and of Wonderful Tennessee three decades later. Both plays share popular American song titles and call on the classical music repertoire: Mendelssohn in the first, Bach and Beethoven in the second. (Chopin in turn, dominates Aristocrats: Friel is nothing if not egalitarian.) In addition, they announce a departure from naturalism while chronicling recognizable lives for which memory is essential therapy and in which regret looms large.
But it’s meant as no slight to Philadelphia! to note the later play’s maturity set against the earlier one’s youthful exuberance (and occasional stylistic infelicities). Both Tennessee and Lughnasa bear the imprint of a man who knows his classic literate – Friel has worked regularly as a translator of Chekhov (Three Sisters) and Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, A Month in the Country) in particular – and Tennessee especially seems to evoke Uncle Vanya in its characters’ ceaseless assessments of their own emotional states. (The psychic temperature-taking, much of it coupled with the ironic usage of songs like “I Want to Be Happy,” follows from Grace’s rending litany “happy, happy, happy!” in Faith Healer.)
For in the end, Friels career describes a continuum whose component parts finally bleed into one. The quotes juxtaposed at the start of this piece show both how long and how short that journey has been. In Philadelphia!, Private Gar looks ahead to a time when what remains in the memory “is going to be [my italics] precious, precious gold,” whereas in Lughnasa onwards that alchemy exists in the moment – in “those assuaging notes and hushed rhythms” of life right now.
No wonder the bookie Terry in Wonderful Tennessee fails to arrive at his island, as pregnant an image of death as Harold Pinter’s “no man’s land.” Death is very much more a reality now for a dramatist whose work has always carried intimations, and then some, of mortality. But like Frank Hardy in Faith Healer, who refuses even posthumously to be silenced, Friel will not stop asserting the richness of this life and the mystery of the Other. “To attest to affirm to acknowledge,” exults Angela in Tennessee’s final crescendo, and one senses the playwright right there with her, singing the sad, sweet song of existence which is, in the end, wonderful.
