Goodbye to Ballybeg

Philadelphia, Here I Come! by Brian Friel. All honor to Shakespeare, but parting is not sweet sorrow. When a man leaves home, love and country, he buries part of himself, and he is not likely to stand beside that grave dry-eyed. Philadelphia, Here I Come! is a young man's leave-taking crammed into one night, as Gareth O'Donnell says goodbye to the Irish village of Ballybeg and prepares to embark by jet for America, "a vast, restless place that doesn't give a curse about the past." The play is honest, lyrical, unaffected and affecting.

The past curses Gareth: it holds memories of a girl who loved him and whom he loved, but he could not get his peasant soul to stand upright and ask for her hand from her senator father, and she married someone else. Gareth's present, equally hard to stomach, is his own storekeeper father, for whom he works rather like an indentured servant. "Old Screwballs," as Gareth refers to him, is clench-lipped, word-shy, and sclerotically set in his ways. An evening with him is an unaltering ritual of despair: one cup of tea (never two), a game of checkers with the canon, a grunt of shoptalk. Gareth's father puts on his glasses to see the paper, never his son. Yet there is a kind of love between the two, all the more painful for being inarticulate. The words that hurt the most on this final evening together are the words that are not said.

Gareth must also fight a subtler kind of slavery. Before he can enter the jet, he must wrench himself from the womb of place. To be reborn, he must be unborn. He must blot out the streets and scents of Ballybeg. He must stop his ears against the voices of friends and their loutish camaraderie. He must stiffen in the embrace of the drunken schoolmaster, a surrogate father who has fed Gareth's blind yearnings as surely as his true father has starved his spirit. And he must face the vision of what he may become, in the person of a blowsy ginned-up Irish-American aunt who is making his exodus to America possible.

The play does more than dabble in sentiment. It is wet with it. But Playwright Friel frequently and expertly applies the dry saving sponge of humor. Without O'Casey and Joyce, the play might have existed, but not so good a play. Friel utilizes reverie, flashback, and stream of consciousness, but his cleverest device is to divide Gareth O'Donnell into a public and private self played, respectively, by Patrick Bedford and Donal Donnelly. This palpable alter ego, invisible to the other characters, acts as a jazzy Greek chorus, a human pep pill, and a court jester. He laughs when the hero cries and cries when the hero laughs--an alert, ironic, ever-present border guard to keep self-pity from invading pity.

The Dublin-dominated cast performs Philadelphia on Broadway, and it is uniformly excellent. Other people speak English; the Irish play it. Philadelphia is not scored for brass, timpani, or full dramatic orchestra, but it exquisitely renders the chamber music of existence.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.