Epiphanys threshold Essay Example For Students

Epiphanys threshold Essay My soul today is heaven on earth / O could the transport last,' sing two women at the end of the first scene of Brian Friels recent play, Wonderful Tennessee. And in answer to the question posed in the hymn, one wants to shout as Angela, one of the plays six mortality-haunted characters, will later in the play Yes, Yes, Yes! Now 64, the Irish dramatist has devoted his astonishing career to moments of transport sure to number among the lasting achievements of contemporary drama. This year in the US., those achievements are finding their broadest exposure yet. Dancing at Lughnasa, Friels 1990 memory play whose accumulated laurels include a Best Play Olivier award in London and three Tony awards, is the most widely produced script in the American regional theatre this season, according to its Broadway producer, Noel Pearson. (At least 24 productions will have been seen by seasons end, including three playing this month in Alabama, Minnesota and Wisconsin.) On April 12, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn. starts a month-long engagement of the Abbey Theatre of Dublins extraordinary production of Faith Healer, with the same trio of actors that galvanized Londons Royal Court Theatre two years ago: Donal McCann, Sinead Cusack and Ron Cook. In August, that shows director, Joe Dowling, makes his Roundabout Theatre debut in New York with a revival of Philadelphia, Here I Come! (through Oct. 2), the play that first introduced Broadway audiences to Friel nearly 30 years ago. In 1995, Pearson plans to produce a revival of Translations, under the direction of Robin Lefevre, on Broadway. We were always balanced somewhere between the absurd and the momentous, comments an earlier Frank the itinerant con man at the heart of Faith Healer, arguably Friels greatest play, as well as his most structurally dense and challenging. Friels plays, in fact, inhabit exactly that point somewhere between. He tells of lives spent on the threshold of epiphany, of people who, like the kindred Franks in these plays, are thrown back on the often grotesque absurdity of their own condition. (Such is doubly the case in Faith Healer whose voluble hero owe ultimately discover speaking from beyond the grave.) Epiphanies arrive, but Friel insists we take from them not the momentous occassio ns themselves but their lingering after-effects. In Dancing at Lughnasa, the blazing revel of the title comes not at any natural point of climax but midway through Act 1, as the five spinsterish Mundy sisters find release from working-class drudgery one summer day in 1936 in a Dionysiac outburst common to Friels work. (In Faith Healer, Frank signposts an authorial leitmotif at the end of his first monologue, recalling A Dionysian night. A Bacchanalian night. A frenzied, excessive Irish night when ritual was consciously and relentlessly debauched.) Some argue that Lughnasa errs in playing its titular card so early, but surely the plays true dance lies elsewhere: in the hypnotic movements accompanying the surrender of to be in touch with some otherness which the narrator Michael, an authorial alter ego gently write large, speaks wistfully of in his closing soliloquy. Similarly, Wonderful Tennessee might seem to peak too early in the cancerous Georges ferocious accordion rendition of the Moonlight Sonata played, his wife Trish says, as if he were afraid to stop. But Friel fearlessly plunges ahead, allowing the reflective silence following Georges recital to inform every moment of the play thereafter. Otherness is this plays theme, too specifically so, since its characters are all trying to get to one Oilean Draiochta, the so-called Island of Otherness, Island of Mystery and it is essential to Friels method that these ecstatic bursts hover as a link between the pagan, the aesthetic and the transcendental making a nonsense of formal religion. (Not for nothing did Friel abandon teenage aspirations to the priesthood.) This dramatist writes metaphysical mood pieces not showstoppers, and his most haunting passages lie in his characters inevitable reacquaintance with this world even as they acknowledge, usually silently, the next. Low comedy and high ideals EssayBut its meant as no slight to Philadelphia! to note the later plays maturity set against the earlier ones youthful exuberance (and occasional stylistic infelicities). Both Tennessee and Lughnasa bear the imprint of a man who knows his classic literate Friel has worked regularly as a translator of Chekhov (Three Sisters) and Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, A Month in the Country) in particular and Tennessee especially seems to evoke Uncle Vanya in its characters ceaseless assessments of their own emotional states. (The psychic temperature-taking, much of it coupled with the ironic usage of songs like I Want to Be Happy, follows from Graces rending litany happy, happy, happy!  in Faith Healer.) For in the end, Friels career describes a continuum whose component parts finally bleed into one. The quotes juxtaposed at the start of this piece show both how long and how short that journey has been. In Philadelphia!, Private Gar looks ahead to a time when what remains in the memory is going to be precious, precious gold, whereas in Lughnasa onwards that alchemy exists in the moment in those assuaging notes and hushed rhythms of life right now. No wonder the bookie Terry in Wonderful Tennessee fails to arrive at his island, as pregnant an image of death as Harold Pinters no mans land. Death is very much more a reality now for a dramatist whose work has always carried intimations, and then some, of mortality. But like Frank Hardy in Faith Healer, who refuses even posthumously to be silenced, Friel will not stop asserting the richness of this life and the mystery of the Other. To attest to affirm to acknowledge, exults Angela in Tennessees final crescendo, and one senses the playwright right there with her, singing the sad, sweet song of existence which is, in the end, wonderful.