DANCING AT LUGHNASA
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“You try to keep the home together,” says Kate, the eldest. “You perform your duties as best you can–because you believe in responsibilities and obligations and good order. And then, suddenly, you realize that hair cracks are appearing everywhere–that control is slipping away, that the whole thing is so fragile it can’t be held together much longer.” This control, so dear to Kate and so relied upon (and at times resented) by the other women in the household, crumbles bit by bit: in the face of change, under the pull of the back hills, and under the strain of repressed sexuality and vigor.
The narrator of Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel’s award-winning 1990 play, is Michael (Denis O’Hare), a mature man looking back on the (fictional) village of Ballybeg and his mother and four aunts. He makes sense of his past by reliving for us that particular festival of Lughnasa when, as a seven-year-old, he was aware of “things changing before my eyes, of becoming what they ought not to be.”
The Goodman Theatre, in collaboration with the Arena Stage of Washington, D.C., delivers a warm, engrossing production directed with plenty of nuance by Kyle Donnelly. The beat of African drums mixes uneasily with Celtic wind instruments as the women pound out their own percussion in common household tasks, the rattle of chicken feed counterpointing the sweep of an iron smoothing out a surplice. Linda Buchanan’s set design–a combined kitchen and garden–does not convey the claustrophobia one might expect in a place that houses seven people, but it is richly textured, and the sky beyond is a multicolored, irresistible invitation to dance.
