“Dancing at Lughnasa”: A Dance Out of the Dark
You could call the rite that takes place for the festival of Lughnasa a kind of dance. It’s a traditional Celtic paean to the harvest god Lugh, however bountiful or poor the crop. Yet for the Mundy sisters of County Donegal, Ireland in Brian Friel’s luminous play Dancing at Lughnasa, featured at The Irish Repertory Theatre, it’s a dance that doesn’t stop at the feet, but resides deep within the innermost recesses of the human heart.
Dancing at Lughnasa made theatre history when it first opened on Broadway in 1991, winning a much deserved Tony for Best Play. The Irish Repertory Theatre has made a wise choice to give New York audiences another opportunity to experience its magic in this new twentieth anniversary production. Director Charlotte Moore (a long time theatrical veteran of Friel’s work) has polished it off with a fine, good as new sheen.
A memory play, it nods to an older tradition of poetic realism, reminiscent of American playwrights Tennessee Williams, Wlliam Inge, and Eugene O’Neill. Michael, the grown son of one of the five unmarried Mundy sisters, acts as the narrator and at times, unseen, the seven-year-old boy who hovers outside the walls of the humble cottage. It’s a difficult dramatic conceit for any actor and Ciarán O’Reilly does his solid best at the task. He carries us back on Friel’s lyrical passages to the summer of 1936, when this fragile band of siblings still held tight against social ostracism and coming industrialization.
As if the struggles of these five sisters were not enough for any family to bear, Michael’s Uncle Jack, played with a doddery charm by Michael Countryman, has returned after 25 years in Uganda as a missionary priest in a leper colony. What he brings, besides his advancing forgetfulness of the English tongue, is a memory of pagan rituals. That’s no small thing, as his beliefs are a blasphemy, especially to the intractable Catholicism of his sister Kate.
Kate, as played by Orlagh Cassidy, is the eldest, the stalwart schoolteacher who rules this ragtag tribe as best she can. It’s a thankless job, as mutiny seems ever close on the horizon, and eventually, two of the sisters, Agnes and Rose, will take flight like two wounded birds doomed to fall. Nevertheless, Cassidy’s brittle determination in the role is a sight to behold. Her stiff-backed exterior and pop-eyed will (as if summoning at times film star Bette Davis’ own unshakable spirit in her best roles) is perfectly-pitched.
Then there’s Maggie. The most bombastic, and at times, hilarious of the tribe – eliciting proof that actress Jo Kinsella was born for the challenge. Every glance, every insulting slur of this Irish-born performer’s tongue, every rise and fall of her limbs and buttocks is exquisitely timed to the moment. This is never more in evidence than when she lets out a wrenching cry just before her own dance to Lughnasa. It’s a cry that reverberates through the audience, a cry as each sister finds her own dance that will lift the rafters of this ramshackle prison of a household in Ballybeg and go straight up to the stratosphere.
Freedom, at least for one brief span, reigns.
As much as the perfect production exists in the minds of the director and the audience alike, to fall short of that aspiration is only human. This is a play of words as well as action. It is a well- seasoned cast, who has come naturally to the thick brogue of the script, or has done their homework well—maybe too well, as there are moments when one strains to understand every colorful phrase and inflection. Only the narrator seems to have escaped the restrictions of such particularized speech, but in those instances, he falls prey to another problem every actor knows—pacing. In those protracted moments of his monologues, the brisk, naturalized world of his aunts is stilled, and it becomes all the more important that we are held rapt. A little quickening of the pace, a well-paced rise and fall of tempo, could help considerably.
As movement is so crucial to this production, even if just an impulse of itchy feet in the characters themselves, the interplay between choreographer Barry McNabb and the director is paramount. This is never more so marked than in the cathartic dance sequence among the five sisters.
“I’ve worked with Barry for 20 years,” commented Moore. “We did it together, but he actually said before I did that each actress has to discover in the dance what’s in her own head.”
McNabb is a champion step-dancer and this was an enormous boon. She felt that the dance becomes a kind of unfailing shorthand for language itself, a way of articulating their pent-up passions. Repression finally leads to release.
Dance and its primal powers can also be deceptive. Chris, the youngest sister, played with an earnest conviction by Annabel Hagg, is faced with the return of Gerry, the lover who has abandoned her and the son she had out of wedlock. In Kevin Collins’ spot-on portrayal, he’s full of blarney and big plans for their future, but she’s no fool—or if so, only momentarily, when he takes her in his arms with some serious footwork. Little matter that he’s smitten more with his own powers of persuasion and his Fred Astaire turns than with his partner.
For there’s another culprit loose and it’s the new Marconi radio, releasing a wave of sound upon the kitchen. In his script, Friel has aptly introduced “Dancing in the Dark” as one of the numbers and the music itself becomes a portent to the troubles to come. When Gerry proposes, Chris chides: “Don’t talk any more, no more words. Just dance me down the lane, and then you’ll leave.”
This ensemble of sisters is so well attuned to each other’s every nuance, scene-stealing would be a crime, but Aedin Moloney as the daft sister Rose must have been tempted. She effortlessly tugs at the heart in her bad-child, shrunken posture and her sparrow-like gestures. Rachel Pickup as Agnes is a perfect counterpoint to Rose, a tall, thin, willowy creature who, in spite of her natural beauty, lurks on the peripheries of the set, forlorn and almost forgotten.
Little wonder that the biggest challenge part for Moore was to find not just five sisters, but the right sisters. “Casting was the hardest part,” she said. “The bottom line [being], each character [is] so different, so specific.”
Antje Ellermann’s set design has given air and space to the actors. Only the necessities prevail—a hearth, a table and chairs, a bench, a bucket, a cross, a sky blue scrim, and a suggestion of wild grass at the borders. It’s enough. And costume designers Linda Fisher’s and Jessica Barrios’s drab costuming allows for freedom of movement, but accentuates the colorless world these women inhabit.
The play ends on Michael’s lingering memory of the Mundys, floating on sound. It becomes his own epiphany, his own salvation. “Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement—as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak…as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary…” he says slowly, before the bringing down of the lights.
The play has an extended run at The Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 until January 29th. For more information visit http://www.irishrep.org.
