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Becoming Brian Friel: Philadelphia, Here I Come!
At the Irish Rep, early work by a future master.
With the five indelible sisters at its center and its elegant interweaving of Friel’s deep preoccupations—memory, loss of home and innocence, and Ireland’s inextricable knot of relationships with its own history, obsolescence, and progress— Lughnasa is a perennial favorite for revival. There’s something edging near to Beckett in a game of checkers between Screwballs and a local clergyman (Ciaran Byrne); and when “the boys” come over, brown paper bag of Guinness bottles in tow, to bid Gar a rowdy farewell before his transatlantic flight the next morning, O’Reilly’s actors find the existential emptiness underneath the rambunctiousness and smutty talk. Ned (James Russell), the alpha, is all defensive swagger, while Tom (Tim Palmer) is his winking, guffawing yes-man, and Joe (Emmet Earl Smith) is the baby-faced kid along for the ride.
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