Archives for October 2, 2015

Brian Friel was barely more than a name to me when I became the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal in 2003. No play of his had been done on Broadway since Translations ran briefly there eight years earlier. Hence it came as a shock when I saw the Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2005 revival of Philadelphia, Here I Come! and realized at once that it was a work of the highest quality—a masterpiece, in fact. I resolved on the spot to see as many of his plays as I possibly could, and before long it was apparent to me that he and Tom Stoppard were the foremost living playwrights of the English-speaking world.

In due course I became, willy-nilly, something of an advocate for Friel. Not that he needed one—he is universally recognized in Ireland and England as a great writer—but his work has never been widely popular in the United States, and I have since done what I could to make it better known over here, covering twelve Friel revivals in The Wall Street Journal since 2003. As a result, I’ve already said in print most of what I would normally say in an obituary.

This passage from “Chekhov’s Fingerprints,” my 2009 review of the Florida Repertory Theatre production of Dancing at Lughnasa, sums up my feelings as well as anything:

Brian Friel, the greatest playwright of our time, is an Irishman whose works have the fingerprints of a Russian all over them. Anton Chekhov, Mr. Friel’s master, wrote plays in which plot takes a back seat to atmosphere, and Russia itself is always the star of the show. As Mr. Friel has pointed out, Chekhov’s flesh-and-blood characters “behave as if their old certainties were as sustaining as ever—even though they know in their hearts that their society is in meltdown and the future has neither a welcome nor even an accommodation for them. Maybe a bit like people of my own generation in Ireland today.” Might it be this transnational spirit that also makes Mr. Friel’s plays so accessible to American audiences and actors?…

A cross between Three Sisters and The Glass Menagerie, Dancing at Lughnasa is a semiautobiographical memory play whose narrator tells what happened to his family during two summer days in 1936. Young Michael lives in a cottage with Chris, his unmarried mother, and her four sisters, all of whom are barely making ends meet. The longings and frustrations of the Mundy sisters have grown too great to bear, and what was once a close-knit family is now—like Europe itself—on the verge of disintegration. The genius of Dancing at Lughnasa is that Mr. Friel has portrayed this sunset hour with the lightest of comic touches, letting the audience laugh as the black shadows that surround the Mundys grow imperceptibly longer.

Alas, there hasn’t been a New York production of any of Friel’s plays since 2012, when the Irish Rep staged The Freedom of the City, and none of them has been produced on Broadway since Translations was revived there in 2007. Perhaps his death at the age of eighty-six will lead to wider American interest in his work.

A personal note: it was Friel and Horton Foote, his opposite number on this side of the Atlantic, who initially inspired me when I first began to write for the stage. I shall always be grateful without stint to both men—neither of whom I ever had the privilege to meet—for what their example has meant to me.

The stage of the world feels empty this morning.

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Excerpts from the 2006 Broadway revival of Faith Healer, starring Ralph Fiennes:

The opening of John Ousted’s 1974 film version of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, starring Donal McCann and Des Cave:

The trailer for Pat O’Connor’s 1998 film version of Dancing at Lughnasa, starring Meryl Streep:

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of Deaf West Theatre’s revival of Spring Awakening and the Chicago transfer of the Aaron Posner-Teller production of The Tempest. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s been twelve years since Hollywood’s Deaf West Theatre brought its sublime staging of “Big River,” the 1985 musical based on “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” to Broadway. I couldn’t imagine going in how a mixed cast of deaf and hearing actors would manage to make theatrical sense out of a musical, but I was cheering my head off by evening’s end. So I’m not at all surprised that the Broadway transfer of Deaf West’s revival of “Spring Awakening,” directed by Michael Arden, makes an impression that is, if anything, even more overwhelming than “Big River.”

I say this even though I’m not a fan of the Steven Sater-Duncan Sheik rock-and-roll version of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play about pubescent sexuality, which I found cloyingly sentimental when it opened in 2006. Few things in theater are rarer than a production so fine that it cries out to be seen in spite of the show, but that’s the case with Deaf West’s “Spring Awakening”: It ranks among the most emotionally charged renderings of a musical to come to Broadway in the past decade, one that all who love the genre should rush to see….

Mr. Arden’s work is new to me, but I think it’s safe to say that he’s going to be big, not least because he has triumphantly solved the problem—so well that it no longer seems problematic—of fusing deaf and hearing actors into an indissoluble whole. Every word of “Spring Awakening” is also “spoken” in American Sign Language, sometimes individually and sometimes in chorus, and Mr. Arden has found a seemingly endless number of ways to use this convention to stunningly beautiful, almost ballet-like effect….

Chicago Shakespeare Theater has remounted the magic-show staging of “The Tempest” by Aaron Posner and Teller (better known as the quieter half of Penn & Teller) that I saw last year in Cambridge, Mass., and praised as “fanciful, mysterious and full of cheerily broad comedy….It is—in a word—magical.”

Why review it a second time? Because American Repertory Theatre’s original production featured a troupe of youthful actors who weren’t quite able to make magic out of Shakespeare’s verse. Not so this much more strongly cast version, in which Prospero, Shakespeare’s vengeful sorcerer, is played by Larry Yando, the Chicago-based performer whose appearances in Writers Theatre’s “Dance of Death” and Chicago Shakespeare’s “King Lear” established him as one of this country’s foremost classical actors. Once again Mr. Yando outdoes himself, giving a performance in which the sardonic rasp of rage gives way to the quiet voice of reconciliation….

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To read my review of Spring Awakening, go here.

To read my review of The Tempest, go here.

The trailer for Spring Awakening:

The trailer for The Tempest:

Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan talk about technology on The Summer Way, originally telecast on the CBC in 1968:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)

Nor is the people’s judgment always true:
The most may err as grossly as the few.

John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel”