Theatre in Review: Dancing at Lughnasa (Irish Repertory Theatre)

	Ciarán O'Reilly Photo: Carol Rosegg

It's funny how the size of a theatre affects one's perceptions of a play. When Dancing at Lughnasa opened on Broadway 20 years ago, I was among the very few who found it to be dramatically static, a literary memoir that somehow found itself occupying a theatre stage. (To be sure, that stage, at the Plymouth Theatre, as the Gerald Schoenfeld was then known, seemingly offered a right-size setting for Brian Friel's play.) Seeing it again the other night at the far more intimate Irish Repertory Theatre, it seems to me that Dancing at Lughnasa benefits from a close-up view, allowing one to take in every detail in Friel's landscape of heartbreak. In Charlotte Moore's staging, it's not necessarily a more dramatic work, but it is infinitely more moving.

Set in 1936 in Ballybeg, Friel's own personal fictional corner of Ireland, Dancing at Lughnasa is a family portrait, made all the more touching because its members don't know that, as a unit, their days are numbered. They include Christina, who is left to raise her son, Michael, alone, her days spent waiting for the occasional visit from Gerry, the child's father; Maggie, who presides over the kitchen with rude good humor; Agnes, who yearns for Gerry from afar; Rose, who, as the characters might say, isn't quite right; and Kate, a schoolteacher, who presides over the family's morals with an iron fist. ("Today, it's lipstick; tomorrow, it's the gin bottle.") Also in the house is Jack, their brother, a former African missionary who has returned carrying the faint odor of scandal, his interest in the rites of the Catholic Church having declined in direct proportion to his growing fascination with African religions. Acting as our host is the adult Michael, who offers commentary on the characters' fates and steps in as his eight-year-old self as needed.

The play observes the sisters' daily rituals over the course of three weeks, ending on the day before disaster strikes. As they go about the business of keeping house, making dinner, and sewing the gloves, which provides a modest income, we become well-acquainted with their myriad of worries and sadnesses -- the romances that never came their way; the growing industrial development that menaces their way of life; and the fear that Jack will never seem normal to them again. In the play's most celebrated sequence, the sisters break into a furious, spontaneous dance -- the only way they have of unleashing so many feelings buried under layers of suffocating respectability. From time to time, Michael reminds us of the years of loss and dislocation that await them.

I'm still not convinced that Dancing at Lughnasa might not work better as a prose piece, but, under Moore's direction, a multitude of nuances add up to a pointillist picture of emotionally starved siblings clinging to each other for dear life, even as little cracks of conflict appear between them. There's the cold eye with which Annabel Hägg's Christina views an impromptu fox trot between Gerry and Agnes. There's the defiant tilt of Aedín Molony's head when Rose returns from an afternoon luxuriously spent pursuing her own pleasures. And it's impossible to ignore the desperation in Orlagh Cassidy's voice when Kate crushes the other's hopes of attending the harvest dance. ("Do you want the whole countryside to be laughing at us? Women of our years? Mature women, dancing? What's come over you all?")

There's also fine work from Jo Kinsella's earthy, rough-edged Maggie; Rachel Pickup's tense and melancholy Agnes; Michael Countryman's addled, yet visionary, Jack; Kevin Collins' handsome, feckless Gerry; and Ciarán O'Reilly's sadly omniscient Michael. And, for a play in which time and place are everything, Dancing at Lughnasa also benefits from a beautifully realized production design. Antje Ellermann's set places the elements of the family kitchen -- a stove, a fireplace, a table -- against a sweeping, curved vista of the nearby mountains, with the sea in the distance. The lighting, by Richard Pilbrow and Michael Gottlieb, making surprisingly effective use of LED units in many cases, smoothly shifts from time-of-day looks to more richly colored washes suggestive of the characters' interior lives. The costumes, by Linda Fisher and Jessica Barrios, fit the characters like real clothes, from Kate's prim and rigidly shaped outfit to Maggie's dowdy house dress and Gerry's wrinkled linen suit. M. Florian Staab's sound design captures the enlivening bursts of "Anything Goes" and "Dancing in the Dark" that come in on the kitchen wireless; he also provides subtle reinforcement for the original music by Ryan Rumery and Christian Frederickson.

In the end, it's hard not to be moved by these women as they reach out, looking to grab a moment of fulfillment before returning to an existence defined by every kind of want. Many, if not all, of Friel's plays -- Faith Healer, Molly Sweeney, Wonderful Tennessee -- can be best appreciated for their lovely, lyrical words rather than for any inherently dramatic qualities, and this is especially so of Dancing at Lughnasa. But what words they are. Here's Michael, remembering the women "dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary..."

For writing like that, it's possible to put up with a few longueurs. It's also possible to see Dancing at Lughansa for the sheer enjoyment of watching the members of this fine company practicing their craft.--David Barbour