Luck of the Irish

Irishman Brian Friel’s Tony award-winning play, Dancing at Lughnasa, highlights the changing Irish experience and its effects on Celtic culture. Directed with a knowing hand by Irish-raised and-educated professor William Tate, this production helps capture the Irish experience with heartbreaking poignancy.

Lughnasa is an ancient Irish Pagan holiday that some Irish still celebrate, a kind of harvest festival that happens at the beginning of August. The events of the play take place over the summer weeks leading up to the festival in 1936.

Lughnasa is told from the perspective of Michael, the child of an unwed Irish mother. Michael lives with his mother, Christina, and her four unmarried sisters outside a small town in the North of Ireland. The oldest sister, Kate, is a schoolteacher who brings in money for the family. Two other sisters, Agnes and Rose, knit gloves to make a little extra money. Maggie and Christina work around the house.

Their older brother, Jack, has just returned home from Africa, where he was a priest for a leper colony. He is sick with malaria and has forgotten much of his native English, including his sisters’ names, because he spoke Swahili for so many years.

Lughnasa is traditionally a time of change. The summer comes to an end and the harvest is completed. Soon the leaves will fall and winter will set in. This Lughnasa is also a time of change for the sisters. Jack’s arrival causes quite a stir, especially with the devoutly Catholic Kate, once it becomes obvious that Jack was sent home because he had adopted the Pagan rituals of the Africans he worked with. The unexpected return of Michael’s father, Gerry, also helps to upset the balance the sisters have worked to build.

When Gerry shows up and proposes to Michael’s mother, he causes a ruckus, due in large part to the fact that Christina is not the only sister he works to charm. His advances are further tempered by his resolve to leave with the International Brigade to fight the fascist government in Spain. All these tensions help fuel the play as it moves through considerations of Irish morality, spirituality and cultural identity.

There is considerable variety among the accents of the different actors in this production. Donegal County, where the play is set, is known for having a variety of accents, but it is more likely that it was just difficult to get all the actors to adopt the same intonation. They all do a decent job at the accent, just slightly differing from one another.

Ian Goodrich brings a refreshing playfulness to Michael, the narrator. Nichole Cooper is vivacious in her role as Michael’s mother, Christina, and Hank Pailet plays Michael’s father, Gerry, with a swinging charm.

Corinna Erin Van Liew disappears so far into the character of developmentally disabled sister Rose that she is hardly recognizable. Roger L. Baron has the look of a man not in this world as lapsed priest Jack, and Virginia Thayer brings a discreet charm and sweetness to Agnes, the other sister Gerry woos.

As has often been the case for the Irish, the revelations at the end of the play are sad. Its pathos helps highlight the tensions within Irish culture between ancient Pagan wildness and strict Catholic (or occasionally Calvinist) properness.

What Dancing at Lughnasa brings into focus is the opposition of these forces and how they have come to shape the rich and tortured history of the Irish people.

Dancing at Lughnasa 7:30 p.m., May 28-31Lincoln Hall, Main Stage$4 for PSU students at the door a half-hour early $8.50 for staff, seniors and other students$9.50 for general publicBring canned food