Dancing at Lughnasa opened on Broadway in October 1991 and won the 1992 Tony Award for Best Play. Fortunately for us, the Irish Repertory Theatre has revived Brian Friel’s bittersweet masterpiece just in time for its 20th anniversary.
This largely autobiographical memory play is based on the lives of Friel’s mother and aunts. It unfolds in the summer of 1936 at the Mundy family home outside of Ballybeg, a village in County Donegal, Ireland. Friel describes the locale as a “village of the mind, more a depository for remembered or invented experience than a geographical location.” The drama is told from the perspective of Michael (Ciaran O’Reilly), the adult narrator who also speaks the lines of the unseen boy (Michael as a seven-year-old) during the time when his family’s way of life would change forever.
Born “out of wedlock,” Michael lives with his 26-year-old single mother, Chris (played convincingly by Annabel Hagg), and her four unmarried older sisters. The eldest sister, Kate (portrayed perfectly by a maternal, buttoned-up Orlagh Cassidy), is a repressed 40-year-old schoolteacher and the family’s only regular wage earner. Maggie (a happy-go-lucky Jo Kinsella) is the lighthearted and good-natured sister, and she keeps house. The complicated Agnes (Rachel Pickup, whose delicate beauty resembles that of Uma Thurman) and Rose (Aedin Moloney) make some money knitting gloves at home; Agnes is protective of the simple Rose. In a first-rate, eight-member ensemble, Moloney stands out in a heartbreaking performance as the fragile sister desperate for love.
The two adult men in young Michael’s life are both colorful figures. Gerry Evans (an appealing Kevin Collins) plays his father, a seductive but unreliable Welshman and jack-of-all-trades who, much to Kate’s disapproval, drifts in and out of Chris’s life. Michael Countryman is memorable as Father Jack, Michael’s uncle. The oldest member of the Mundy clan, he has just returned home, forgetful and stricken with malaria, after spending 25 years in Uganda as a Catholic missionary priest at a leper colony. Jack’s embrace of the uninhibited native tribal ceremonies he witnessed in Africa stands in sharp contrast to Kate’s rejection of all forms of merriment, including the harvest dance that celebrates the pagan Festival of Lughnasa.
Under Charlotte Moore’s skillful direction, the superb cast captures the soul of Friel’s beautifully written, nostalgic tale of family and change, a world remembered through the eyes of a young boy.
Dancing at Lughnasa; Written by Brian Friel ; Directed by Charlotte Moore; Irish Repertory Theatre; 132 West 22nd Street; 212-727-2737; www.irishrep.org
