Dancing at Lughnasa: Unexcused Absence

Dancing at Lughnasa: Unexcused Absence PRAPASSAREE KRAMER Though the memory play represents an increasingly familiar and substantial sub-genre of drama, its conventions - and what might be called its "ontology " - have generally avoided direct scrutiny. By asking the audience to accept the framing narrator's substantiality, but to take the other characters as aspects of that narrator's memory, the memory play poses something of a metaphysical puzzle: namely, how to account for our ability to see into the world of the narrator's memory. Do we assume some telepathic contact with the narrator, or does he possess the ability to make the objects of his memory materialize? Admittedly. simiiarquestions were raised about how the audience at a Shakespearean drama could account for being so swiftly transported across the Mediterranean, and were famously dismissed as shortsightedly pedantic by Samuel Johnson.' One of the most often noted hallmarks of modem drama, however, is the employment of metatheatrical techniques that implicitly or explicitly chaUenge spectators to aconscious examination of their assumptions toward what they observe behind the curtain. Brian Friel is one playwright who has consistently issued such challenges, as is evident in a remarkable series of innovative dramas including Philadelphia , Here I Come (1964), The Loves oiCass McGuire (1966), Living Quarters (1976), Faith Healer (1979), and Molly Sweeney (1994). But Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), though one of Friel's most commercially successful plays, has attracted little scrutiny on a formal level, with most commentary concentrating instead on Friel's critical stance toward industrial capitalism, gender roles, and Catholic dogmatism. Even among the critics who have noted the play's use of a first-person narrator, some dismiss that device as a well-worn invitation to indulge in a nostalgia bath; David Krause, for one, compares Lughnasa to Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938) as "a sentimental memoryplay that celebrates the simple good things of life through the use of a nostalgic narrator who glorifies everyday events.'" Whether or not that judgment is Modern Drama, 43:2 (Summer 2000) 171 172 PRAPASSAREE KRAMER fair to Wilder, it is certainly unfair to Friel, for Ihe narrator's status as a reliable "producer" of the historical pageant he presents to us is precisely what comes into question through Lugltnasa's making and breaking of the memory frarne. In the minds of many playgoers, the memory frame was virtually invented and patented by Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie (1944), and many will perceive the dramatic kinships between Michael, Lughnasa's narrator , and Tom Wingfield; each is the only male member of a family struggling wilh financial and social difficulties in the late 1930s, and each makes a selfserving escape, abandoning his female relatives to their fate. In other crucial respects, however, Lughnasa departs radically from the presentational methods of the paradigmatic memory play, as if to insist on the problematic nature of its own modeI.' While Tom moves almost searnlessly through the fourth wall from his role as narrator into his role as a character in the main action, Michael never crosses that boundary. By leaving the narrator literally "outside " the action and separate from "his" characters throughout the drama, Lughnasa maintains a powerful distancing effect4 And whereas Tom Wingfield 's opening address to the audience is delivered solo,' Friel has Michael offer his introductory monologue while presenting his family in silent tableau, as if to establish Michael more finnly as "author," introducing "his" characters . The presentation accentuates the different temporal planes occupied by the narrator and members of his family; the narrator inhabits the present with the audience, but his family remains frozen in 1936. Opening and closing tableaux particularly reveal Michael's judgments on his family and on himself, emphasizing his role as the creator and arranger of stage events, not just their recorder. In each tableau, Ihe characters are divided into two groups, one inside the house and the other outside in the garden. The tableau positioning of those trapped in 'the house - Chris, Maggie, and Kate serves as a shorthand dramatization of their lives. Chris's position at the door signifies her trespasses against the rules of the house as the mother of a child out of wedlock. She has...