Spread the Word

Translations

by Mark Cofta

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Published: Oct 25, 2006

Some might think Princeton is too far to travel for theater, but it's closer than New York City, and the parking's better, too. Seeing a Broadway-bound production like McCarter and Manhattan Theatre Club's powerful revival of Brian Friel's Translations in Princeton just makes good sense. The two companies import Irish director Garry Hynes (the first woman to win a Best Director Tony Award, for The Beauty Queen Of Leenane), whose staging captures the 1981 play's sweeping historical significance through intimate, nuanced performances.

In 1833, two English officers — stiff Captain Yancey (Graeme Malcolm) and romantic George (Chandler Williams) — visit tiny Baile Beag, Friel's favorite setting, on an expedition to map Ireland, anglicizing all place names (e.g., the village becomes Ballybeg), native Owen (Alan Cox) serves as uneasy interpreter, slyly twisting his translations to ease tensions.

Around their task swirl fascinating characters and stories: Owen's father Hugh (Irish actor Naill Buggy) is the blustery master of a hedge school (a local one-room operation, soon to be obsolete). Owen's brother Manus (David Costabile) serves Hugh, teaching mute Sarah (magnetic, mysterious Morgan Hallett) to speak her name, but longs for his own post so he can marry Maire (Susan Lynch, another fine Irish guest artist).

Friel wrote Translations in English, but we quickly glean that the natives speak Gaelic, so much fun emerges from characters' awkward attempts to bridge the language barrier (often by speaking loudly and slooooowly at each other). Most moving is George's delirious love for all things Irish, including dark beauty Maire; their romance tantalizes us with a vision of Irish and English cultures merging smoothly, but reality soon intrudes.

Friel's heartwrenching play is not about Irish history so much as language's inevitable evolution and the innocent victims left in its wake. George feels he's found his home in Ireland, but knows he'll always be an outsider, just as Maire would be in England; what their love seems to trigger — Friel is wonderfully ambiguous — is tragic and unstoppable.

Hynes' masterful production reveals the play's subtleties, balancing a sense of impending despair (the devastating potato famine looms) with a uniquely Irish tone of melancholy hope, beautifully realized in Francis O'Connor's vast, earthen-floored, rustic set and convincingly worn costumes, and Davy Cunningham's delicately sculpted lighting.

As in Dancing At Lughnasa and his many other great plays, Friel balances love and loss vividly, creating a world and its tender, tortured people that stays with us long after.

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)

Translations

Through Oct. 29, McCarter Theatre, Matthews Stage, 91 University Place, Princeton, N.J., 609-258-2787, www.mccarter.org

Things That Matter To People Who Matter
The Unblinking Ear
On Golden Pond
Reading Writers
Sankai Juku
Dancing in the Dark
Book 'Em
Petit Four
Taming of the Screw
Things Falls Apart