Stage:

...The play is constructed of the querulous and loving cross-talk of the group which manages to reveal the ways in which district Judge O'Donnell, a tyrant in the name of tradition, ruined the lives of his children...

...the only son, Casimir, is a feckless homosexual who lives in Germany with an imaginary family- a wife and two sons...

...There I go again, but, then, you know what American scholars are like...

...The production can afford to be amiable, as likable as the two performers-Gelinas and his wife Huguette Oligny, the Marie-Ange of the 1951 Tit-Coq...

...The oldest daughter, who has been forced to farm out her beloved illegitimate child, spends her days nursing the father who abuses her for betraying the family...

...Perhaps it is enough to visit and to sympathize with the O'Donnells as they get ready to go their separate ways, leaving the decaying mansion and the imaainarv croauet court which may represent the Catholic aristocracy...

...The play is negligible, except that it reflects the distance Canadian villages have come since Tit-Coq strutted the boards, but its value lies not in its up-to-date ideas or its old-fashioned dramaturgy but in its service as a vehicle for Gelinas and Oligny...

...Oligny, by contrast, is elegant, cool, ironic, a classical actress pretending to be a village widow...

...As an unlettered master plumber, a self-made man, Gelinas places himself foursquare on the stage, his stance as blunt as his words...

...As I remember the production after almost forty years, Gelinas gave an ingratiatingly abrasive performance in a fairly obvious play that reflected the author's background in radio and popular theater...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Aristocrats brings the O'Donnell children together at Bally-beg Hall in Donegal for the marriage of the youngest sister and keeps them there for a second act to bury their father...

...New York critics, who found it more sentimental than poignant and who chided it for what they perceived as structural faults, failed to respond to it with the enthusiasm of the home folks, and Gelinas folded the production after three performances...

...Friel's plays have a way of turning up years after their initial Dublin productions...

...Tit-Coq, the story of a reluctant French Canadian soldier who hides his vulnerability and his search for a family beneath the strut that gives him the titular nickname, was the most popular Quebecois play of the late 1940s...

...Gelinas, who created Fridolin on the radio, was then-and still is-the best loved actor in Quebec...

...VISITORS FROM ABROAD 'NARCISSE MONDOUX' & 'ARISTOCRATS' Until The Passion of Narcisse Mondoux opened at the Apple Corps Theatre this spring, Gratien Gelinas had not been on a New York stage since 1951, when he brought his Tit-Coq to Broadway...

...he seems to chop his way through unfamiliar territory, momentarily retreating to take in a new idea and then pushing forward, arms flailing, as he becomes an advocate for what he scarcely perceived seconds before...

...Passion is a two-act conversation in which Narcisse, who has come to declare his long unspoken love for the recently widowed Laurentienne Robichaud, loses the conventional male attitudes instilled by the small Quebec village which formed him and becomes an incipient feminist, supporting Laurentienne in her candidacy for mayor...

...A visiting American scholar, whose main function is to elicit true and false exposition, sees the family as one example of his theory about aristocratic decline, getting the sense of the family without the feel of it...

...the youngest is a pianist who was not allowed to pursue her studies and is about to marry a man twice her age...

...Aristocrats, which was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1979, was done last year in London and, probably because it was well-received there, has now made its way to New York...

...Oligny has been back in New York since then-in 1958, when Le Theatre du Nouveau Monde brought Moliere to the old Phoenix Theatre...

...the rest of the cast is American, and a fine ensemble job they are doing of Friel's work...

...the middle daughter is an alcoholic unable to have children (I don't think that that can be laid to Daddy's door...

...There are some funny lines (I am helpless in the face of word-jokes like, "the little black-haired one is Blanche") and a great many obvious ones as the play moves quietly to the expected ending in which the new political alliance promises to become a romantic one as well...

...The Passion ofNarcisse Mondoux, scheduled for a limited run, will be gone by the time this review appears, but another visitor-Brian Friel's Aristocrats-has moved from the Manhattan Theatre Club to an open-ended off-Broadway run and looks to be around for some months...

...It is tempting to suggest that Friel, who would later adapt Chekhov and Turgenev, wishes to generalize from the O'Don-nells to the Irish Catholic aristocracy as a whole, as the title suggests, but the play has a built-in warning against imposing meaning on the script...

...The styles should clash, but they end by playing off one another in a way that makes an attractive couple of both the performers and the characters...

...Brooks Atkinson later reported a flood of letters from Canadians who felt his review to be less a judgment on a play than an attack on a sacred text...

...Except for Casimir, who has invented a Ballybeg he can savor at a distance, they are all ready to let go of the big house, which they cannot afford and which has never been much of a home to them...

...Not that it is a visiting production in the sense that Gelinas's work is...

...Passion is not as ambitious as Tit-Coq, nor as heavily freighted with nationalist significance...

...A reviewer in Le Clarion- a gent named Rene Levesque, who went on to do more flamboyant things-called it, "One of the most original and most poignant works in modern theater...

...Now Gelinas is back with a new play and some of the same double responses are inevitable...

...Only the alcoholic's husband, an upwardly mobile village boy, sees that there is something to lose, but his Ballybeg, the view from below, is scarcely more reliable than Casimir's...

...It is the feel of it-a family in spite of itself-that gives Aristocrats its stage life...

...The local nuances that made the play so important to Quebecois audiences-some of which would have been lost in the translation into English-largely escaped me...

...Only the director (Robin Lefevre) and Niall Buggy, in the demanding role of Casimir, have come from the London production...