Date: Fri 09-Feb-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: SHANNO

Illustration: C

Location: A-8

Quick Words:

theatre-dancing-lughnasa-D'ART

Full Text:

(review "Dancing at Lughnasa" at D'ART, 2/9/96)

Theatre Review-

`Dancing' Is D'ART At Its Very Best

(with dropquote, no photo)

By Julie Stern

DANBURY - On Sunday evening we got stuck in traffic and just managed to get

the last two empty seats at D'ART's presentation of Brian Friel's Dancing at

Lughnasa . The full house was as it should be - director Eric Weitz and his

top-notch cast have put together a production of consummate perfection, by

turns funny, moving and ultimately tragic, but always totally absorbing.

Like Friel's other plays, this one uses the device of a narrator standing

outside the action to place past experiences in clearer perspective; but

unlike The Faith Healer , which played at Long Wharf in New Haven a few years

ago, Dancing at Lughnasa is very accesible.

The disintegration of a proud and close-knit family is seen through the

uncomprehending eyes of a seven-year old boy who is simultaneously an adult,

remembering the climactic summer when he met his father for the first time,

his uncle came home to Ireland after 30 years as a missionary serving lepers

in Uganda, and the five staunch women who make up his household were undone by

a combination of gruelling poverty, mean-spirited gossip and their own

yearning for romance.

In 1936, Michael Mundy lives with his unmarried mother, Chris, and her four

spinster sisters in a farmhouse outside the Donegal village of Ballybeg. Kate,

the educated sister, teaches school and acts as the authority figure in the

household, a figure of prim and strict propriety. In contrast, Maggie, the

family joker who does the cooking and cares for the chickens, brims with

suggestive jokes and easy laughter. Timidly gentle Aggie, and Rose, the

simple-minded youngest sister, make hand-knitted gloves as their contribution

to the family's finances.

The Mundys are poor - their house has neither electricity nor running water -

but singing and joking, they radiate a sense of well-being, anchored in their

genuine mutual love and indomitable joy to one another. When older brother

Jack returns from Africa, his health broken and his mind confused - ostensibly

from malaria - they are delighted to have him, and resolve to nurse him back

to strength.

When Michael's ne'er-do-well father Gerry pays an unexpected visit, his aunts

provide moral support to Chris in her hopeless infatuation, even though they

know him for the lying bounder he is.

Lughnasa is a Celtic harvest festival. In 1936, it was still common for the

country people up in the hills to light fires and participate in frenzied

dancing and mysterious pagan rituals. Although Kate is piously outraged by the

idea of such goings on, the image of dancing echoes throughout the play, not

just in the actual harvest ritual, but in the music the others want to hear on

"Marconi" - their treasured battery-powered radio - and in the glimmers of

detail that come out when Uncle Jack recalls his participation in "ceremonies"

in Uganda.

The "dancing" comes to symbolize the expression of the passionate, instinctive

natural drives that are stifled by the rigid conventions of "decent" society.

It also suggests a more vital, older form of village life that is being

replaced by modern assembly line factories, whose cheap, mass-produced gloves

will put an end to the Mundy sisters' cottage industry work.

The cast in this production is so uniformly good it is hard to single any of

them out for special mention. However, Dick Lewis is so endearing as the

befuddled Jack he has to be seen to be appreciated. In the parts of the

sisters, long-time D'ART veterans Jude Callirgos as Kate and Priscilla Squiers

as Aggie team up with Laurie Brown as Maggie, Kate Grant as Chris, and Ann

Sheehy as Rose in a performance so solid and convincing, for the rest of my

life I will remember them as a real family.

Damien Langan, who is frequently seen at Newtown's Little Theatre, does a

solid job as Michael, whose adult voice fills in the details of what became of

all the family, and invests their lives with a wistful pathos.

Dancing at Lughnasa is D'ART at its very best. Call for tickets while there

are still a few left!

D'ART's presentation of Dancing at Lughnasa continues at St. James Church, 25

West Street in Danbury, through February 17. Tickets are $12 each, $10 for

seniors and students. Call the box office at 790-1161 for reservations.