Director Braden Abraham sends his audience into total darkness at the top of his gorgeous staging of writer Brian Friel’s “Translations,” a rich and prescient Irish drama from 1980 with characters previously played by the likes of Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea and Brian Dennehy. “Translations’ seemed to be everywhere in the last two decades of the 20th century but now, like most of Friel’s masterworks, is rarely seen in the American theater.
As your eyes adjust to the light, you come to see rolling hills, a thatched roof, a dirt floor, barnyard doors, coarse grass and a golden sunset in the corner, all a rich fusion of the work of the designers Andrew Boyce and Maximo Grano De Oro and enough to transport you from Glencoe to Ballybeg, the Irish setting of most all of the late Friel’s plays, including “Dancing at Lughnasa.” Theater often declares itself to be “immersive”; I find myself more readily immersed when the senses are stimulated, the acting feels live and present, the characters seem human, both flawed and vulnerable, and the sense of place is indisputable.
All of which is true with this impeccably cast and staged show.
“Translations” follows a group of Ballybeg folk whose rural lives are interrupted by the 1833 arrival of the English military, determined to create an accurate map of Ireland (part of the Ordinance Survey), which they argue will be mutually beneficial, while also standardizing Gaelic place names.
On a deeper level, the play is about the acquisition of the English language in rural Ireland. Friel’s characters are mostly involved in a so-called Hedge School, in essence the equivalent of joint home-schooling in 19th century Ireland, where Gaelic is the dominant language. (Most people in 1833 Baile Beag, later anglicized as Ballybeg, did not speak English.) The classical languages of Greek and Latin were also taught, the belief being that they were a superior form of communication for the Irish tongue than the King’s English spoken across the North Sea.
Friel’s play clearly laments how Baile Beag was forced into brutally rapid change by militarized outsiders and if this play were written today, it would probably be an anti-colonialist melodrama. But Friel wrote complex characters and he structured this play so that there were hardliners on both sides, a British military captain played by Gregory Linington and an Irish schoolteacher played by Andrew Mueller, who shows us much personal pain. But Friel also wrote a trio of boundary crossers, including a rakish young Irishman named Owen (the live-wire Casey Hoekstra), who positions himself between the English and Irish and has to learn that any role where you upset both sides comes with a high personal price.
But Friel’s main focus is on an ambitious Baile Beag student named Maire (Tyler Meredith) who sees English as a gateway to American opportunity and escape, and Lieutenant Yolland (Erik Hellman), an English soldier of rural Norfolk origins who falls in love with Ireland and wishes to remain there, even if that means learning Gaelic. Whether this represents genuine feeling or some kind of sentimental fetish is open to question, which Abraham clearly understands, but Yolland’s stated desires are good enough for Maire and, in two beautifully wrought performances, Meredith and Hellman really make you see how most people throughout history have had to weigh power structures they cannot control against quests for personal happiness.
Abraham stages their most important, damp-grass scene up close to the audience; in his short time in Chicago, the director has shown a sophisticated understanding of thrust staging and a real ability to leverage intimacy for dramatic impact.
