ccSCOOP - ARTS - Dancing at Lughnasa at the Ghent Playhouse

DANCING AT LUGHNASA at the Ghent Playhouse

William Parker

ccSCOOP Review

03-27-09 - Staging a work like Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel’s gorgeous memory play, is an ambitious undertaking. Friel is a romanticist, and the moment-to-moment needs and longings of his characters play against a backdrop of pervasive poverty, poetic longing, and fledgling impulses.

It’s 1936, and the five Mundy sisters are introduced as memory by the play’s narrator, Michael, as he brings to life his childhood with his mother and aunts. There are various objects of a child’s memory—among them, a spinning top. Nostalgia mixed with regret and longing, not to mention an incomparable sense of loss, defines Michael’s story. It is a tale of growth concurrent with loss. There is his uncle, Father Jack, back from the missionary fields of Uganda, sick with malaria and deteriorating. There is his father, Gerry, a romantic dilettante, drifting recklessly as he abandons his common-law wife and his child. There is his mother, Christina, in first blush of love and alone. There’s a wireless radio in the kitchen that, when it works, evokes feelings of hope, expansion, and anarchic energy in a room where nothing changes. There is a dance in Lughnasa the sisters long for in a way that is akin to Chekhov’s Three Sisters’ dream of Moscow. It is a memory play, therefore, a play of moods. Chekhov comes to mind, as does Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding.

Kate Mundy (Kathleen Carey) looks on as her sisters Rose (Jennifer Young), Agnes (Alexandra Lincoln), and Christine (Dana Harrison) practice their dancing

Returned to his rural Ireland birthplace after 25 years in Africa, Father Jack (Tracy Trimm) beats out a rhythm on kite sticks for his sisters—Rose (Jennifer Young), Agnes (Alexandra Lincoln), Christine (Dana Harrison), and Kate (Kathleen Carey)

The production decided, for whatever reason, not to employ lighting to create either atmosphere or mood, which hampers the efforts of the actors most considerably. In expositional scenes that are supposed to delineate character and establish a mood (thinking specifically of the scene when Gerry returns to Christina for the first time), lighting is nine points of the law. In this production, the stage is awash in bright light without delineation of lighting to individual scenes. Given the space constraints of the Ghent Playhouse (which shouldn’t be an issue given the claustrophobia of the characters’ lives), to not use lighting effectively is to abandon the possibility of bringing these characters to life. Tennessee Williams’ notes for The Glass Menagerie: “The lighting is not realistic. In keeping with the atmosphere of memory, the stage is dim. . . . A free, imaginative use of light can be of enormous value in giving a mobile, plastic quality to plays of a more or less static nature.”

Makeup is not used to any noticeable effect either, leaving healthily complexioned actresses playing impoverished Irishwomen and an actor (Tracy Trimm) sick with malaria on their own, as it were. Is it wrong to say I couldn’t really “see” the characters onstage? It’s a shame, because some really nice work was done by Dana Harrison as Christina, a young woman whose will to maintain childlike innocence and belief would compel you to believe the depth of her relationship with Gerry, and Cathy Lee-Visscher as Maggie, whose need to console and cheer her sisters is the most sincere of all.

In establishing a mood for a play, it’s important to understand that everything emerges from the needs of the characters. I was struck, driving home from the theater, by how much similarity I felt between Friel’s Mundy sisters in Ballybeg, County Donegal, and Frankie Addams and John Henry West’s Deep South.

The peerless and great Harold Clurman’s notes for the original production of The Member of the Wedding

Tennessee Williams’ notes for The Glass Menagerie

Christine (Dana Harrison) and Gerry (Ryan Winkles)

ccSCOOP Commenting Policy & User Agreement

How to Use the Commenting System