Friel Entrancing With Po-Mo Dancing

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.

A second-hand radio most eloquently articulates this contrast by crackling out cheery tunes as the depressing narrative unfolds. Five sisters, all spinsters, struggle to make a living in a small Irish village in the Thirties. Against a backdrop of romanticized childhood memories and the lively, carefree, take-your-mind-off-the-Depression music, the middle-aged sisters try to ignore their economic and social straights, dancing, giggling and squabbling their way into obscurity. These events, in turn, are presented as the childhood memories of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters. The cheery banter and swinging songs belie the grim reality.

Yet 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 the mission because he had 'gone native.' He peppers his accounts of missionary work with graphic narratives of the blood sacrifices and propiatiations of pagan idols in which he eagerly participated. While his sisters encourage him to celebrate Mass, he flings himself into a tribal rain dance with gay abandon. The man whom the village heralded as the vanguard of godliness turns out to have been a gin-addled apostate.

In the Law School Drama Society's production, Kevin Oliver, as Father Jack, further complicates his ambiguous character by portraying him as the most gleeful, warm-hearted and endearing of men. Despite his dishevelled appearance and shambolic demeanor, he exudes joie de vivre and good nature. He undercuts his sinister seduction by the forces of primitive religion with his childlike innocence and enthusiasm.

Laura Putney completes the circle of ambiguity by playing Jack's eldest neice, Kate as superficially severe towards his heresy while secretly devoted to her once-idolized uncle. She explicitly acknowledges the contrast between their past as the eligible belles of the town and their reduced current circumstances. Despite her projected persona as the most serious and dour of the sisters, she conceals the most tender affection of all the characters.

Yet another character whose looks are deceiving is Gerry (Erik Lindseth), the father of Christina's illegitimate child. He seems the archetypal happy-go-lucky loafer. He can never get his act together: he flirts with everyone and commits himself to no one; he's had more professions than most people have hot breakfasts, and claims to be an expert on everything when he actually knows little of anything. But Lindseth depicts a Gerry whose guileless, good-for-nothing layabout image conceals a calculating cold-heartedness.

One by one, Friel undermines the superficial gloss of each character. At the same time, he reveals the gradually deteriorating status of the Mundy family itself. But he never indicates which aspect is more real--which interpretation more true. The script embraces self-contradiction with open arms.

In 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.