It takes only a few minutes into Brian Friel's bittersweet play about his childhood in Ireland to see it take its place on the same shelf of memory plays alongside Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Truman Capote's “A Christmas Memory.” A winner of the 1990 Tony Award for Best Play, Dancing at Lughnasa is set during the summer in the 1936 when his elderly and ailing Grand Uncle Jack (Peter Millard) has returned to his nieces' home in County Donegal after a lengthy sojourn in an African leper colony. Despite their hard scrabble lives, Michael's unwed mother Christina (Sarena Parmar) and her four single sisters lovingly care for the kindly old gentleman as they also raise the young Michael (unseen) and raise the roof of the dwelling with step dancing to a radio that works only on occasion. Another significant occasion is the sporadic visit of Christina's travelling salesman lover Gerry (Kristopher Bowman) who is full of dreams in an otherwise empty reality. The most practical sister Kate (Fiona Byrne) keeps the minimally employed sisters, as gingerly played by Claire Jullien, Diana Donnelly and Tara Rosling, in line adhering to their Catholic faith and committed to their domestic obligations. Under Krista Jackson's direction, the actors reveal the credibly evolving aspects of their characters, none more engaging than Patrick Galligan as the older monologue-driven Michael. If Sue Lepage's setting is not as evocative as it might be, it otherwise frames the words of a playwright who knows how to create a time and place.
