Dancing at Lughnasa

Brian Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa" is a memory play that succeeds by being skeptical of memory, a mental faculty Friel considers as reliable as a second- or third-hand witness, if not worse.

Based in part on Friel's own fraying recollections of his mother, her sisters, and their severely circumscribed lives in 1930s Ireland, the play conforms to the dramatist's thoughtful understanding of what biography or autobiography, at their most honest, can be: some indeterminate combination of fact and invention.

Told from the hazy, present-centered perspective of Michael Evans (Ciar�n O'Reilly), Friel's far-from-omniscient narrator, the play casts a line into the past, trying to bring back even just the vaguest sense of what reality was like for the "fictional" Mundy sisters.

An apparently tight-knit clan, the five sisters reside together in a humble cottage located a couple miles outside the village of Ballybeg (Gaelic for small town) in County Donegal, a locale as tangible as the Fortunate Isles. The setting for many of Friel's works, Ballybeg's mythical quality is also its historical strength, allowing the author to explore changes to the Irish countryside across multiple generations without ever having to worry about the historian's foremost concern: authenticity.

Despite having youth, or some measure of it, still on their side, the sisters' best days already are well behind them. Working hard to sustain themselves at a subsistence level, they all live under the ignominious and terrifying weight of their spinsterhoods.

But the festival of Lughnasa, a late-summer harvest celebration with pagan roots, offers the sisters an impending chance to kick up their heels and forget their miseries, at least for a night. And it also gives them one more shot at the gold, silver, or platinum ring, although the red-blooded young men attending the dance are likely uninterested in any bond that lasts past breakfast, which might be good enough for four of the five Mundy ladies.

Sententious schoolteacher Kate (Orlagh Cassidy), the eldest sister, is the lone holdout, so to speak. Wielding her Catholicism like a cudgel, she scolds her younger sisters into not attending the festival, snuffing out the exhilaration that momentarily brightens the eyes of Maggie (Jo Kinsella), the Rabelaisian wit of the family; Rose (Aed�n Moloney), whose simple-mindedness has become a threat to her own well-being; Agnes (Rachel Pickup), the stolid sister perhaps hiding the greatest reservoir of sadness; and Chris (Annabel H�gg), the unwed mother of "love child" Michael.

Of course, as a long succession of popes could attest, Catholicism is much better at vanquishing pagan pleasures than modern ones. So when seductive rhythms start pouring out of the sisters' new radio, a first connection to the wider world, even Kate cannot completely resist tapping into her baser nature.

Still, she manages to keep a loose rein on her passions during the titular dance that inflames Act One, while her uninhibited sisters circle up and do their best impression of the Bacchae sans the maypole. In keeping with Friel's dramatic intentions, director Charlotte Moore isolates Kate's pinch-faced jig, suggesting that the character's faith continues to be an effective bulwark against the human desires and needs she so viscerally fears.

As in the play's film version starring Meryl Streep, directors have made the mistake of over-sentimentalizing the sisters' frenzied dance, which, more than anything else, should be primal, representing an atavistic catharsis of the women's sufferings. To their great credit, Moore, choreographer Barry McNabb, and dance captain Pickup fully unleash this emotional complexity.

The sisters are surrounded by men who only further increase their stresses and strains, most notably their older brother Father Jack (Michael Countryman), a missionary recently returned from a leper colony in Uganda. An invalid supposedly sent home for "going native," Michael's childhood remembrances of the priest rambling about his houseboy Okawa allude to the possibility that Father Jack may have actually gone Greek. Once a community hero who brought honor to their household, Father Jack is now just another millstone around the sisters' collective necks, threatening to take down their parish reputations along with his own.

Michael's caddish father Gerry (Kevin Collins) is the play's other adult male, a peripatetic adventurer seemingly born to raise and dash the hopes of sweet-natured, lonely young women like Chris. Stepping into his memories to embody his seven-year-old self, Michael struggles to grasp his own pain as much as his mother's, barely coming to any understanding of either.

A lyrical reminder of all the sorrows that time forgets, Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa" is ultimately a play that wrestles with the past and loses. Beautifully so.