Stage

...BRUCE FLEMING Bruce Fleming is an associate professor of English at the United States Naval Academy and was the 1990 Dance Critics Association Fellow...

...Even Marius Petipa's (1822-1910) most abstract sequences appeared in the context of dramatic ballets, and were danced by men and women in character...

...That might at first seem surprising since, as so often in Friel's plays, it is about loss and dissolution...

...The Mundy sisters loved American music, but there is a comic toughness to them that makes me doubt that they would have responded well to On Borrowed Time, had a road company come through Ballybeg...

...The kitchen is shot through with love and comfort, resentment and rebellion--it is a family...

...Dancing at Lughnasa, which comes from Dublin and London trailing clouds of glory, looks as though it is going to be a solid Broadway hit...

...I could do without much of the grown Michael's commentary (the adult explainer is the curse of the memory play), but while the Mundy sisters are on stage I am as susceptible as the next person...

...They burst intermittently from the sometimes working radio (Marconi, as the Mundy sisters call it), the first such instrument to find its way into the Mundy home outside Ballybeg, the County Donegal setting for so many of Friel's plays...

...Poor Nathan Lane, who lacks the built-in suavity of Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the movie's Mr...

...In a profile in the New York Times Magazine (September 29), Friel suggests that the play is "about the necessity for paganism," but the thematic importance of all those dancing feet, on stage or simply described, gives way to the theatrical need to bathe the Mundy sisters ("those five brave Glenties women," Friel's mother and aunts, from whom the characters derive) in a retrospective embrace of memory...

...Beyond the pleasure of performance, the audience is given the cozening comfort of memory which, as Williams said in his notes to Menagerie, "takes a lot of poetic license...

...Pamela Robinson's Anna was suitably passionate, though Raymond Van Mason's Vronsky seemed more like a sneering, pretty boy than a dashing officer for whom Anna would sacrifice so much...

...Such is the case with Brian Friel's Dancing atLughnasa, but the music is in this case is not Tom's "fiddle in the wings" but Irish dances and 1930s' popular songs...

...And I can't seem to stop dancing to "Anything Goes...

...Only Teresa Wright as Granny is more character than actress playing a character...

...and certainly Kate, so appalled by the paganizing of Father Jack, would not have approved of the secular softness of an afterlife where "the woodbine twineth...

...Of course, this lyricism of approach to Balanchine is quite comprehensible in the context of director John Hart's avowed predilection for dramatic or story ballets...

...For whatever abstraction of movement was lost in the Ballet West's interpretation, therefore, the gain was in the sense of immediacy and human involvement it produced...

...Agnes and the slightly retarded Rose learn that a new factory will replace their cottage industry--the making of hand-knitted gloves--eventually triggering their departure from Ballybeg...

...George C. Scott, who directed the production, was presumably enticed by the juicy role of Gramps...

...The Gramps I remember fondly is Lionel Barrymore in the 1939 movie, and if there was ever an actor with more calculated ties and quirks than Barrymore I cannot recall him...

...The Mundy family is about to fall apart in this summer of 1936...

...Scott lives in Barrymore's neighborhood...

...The strength of the production lies with the five actresses (three of whom have been with Lughnasa since the Dublin opening in 1990), who play together so effectively that they not only embody the characters but make them seem--for the moment at least--inseparable...

...Paul Osborn's On Borrowed Time, an adaptation of Lawrence E. Watkin's novel, lacks the bite of his Morning's at Seven, and it creaks a little these days as it sets up coming scenes and sets them up again and still again as though audiences were not very bright...

...GERALD WEALES 6 December 1991:719...

...Brink, is given occasional outbursts--hardly what one would expect of Osborn's death figure--but he and the rest of the cartoon characters are upstaged by Gramps...

...This allies the homage to the pagan god Lugh with the African festival of the first yam--three days of nonstop dancing by Father Jack's leper friends--which the priest describes so eloquently that he makes clear the distance he has moved from his Christian calling...

...Friel would seem to agree...

...Indeed, it may be that the greatest strength of Ballet West is the sense the company conveys of just this involvement: the dancers with the dance, with each other, and finally with the audience...

...Kate, the / oldest sister, a school teacher who tries to hold the family together (religious and social propriety is her glue), loses her job because brother Jack, a priest, has been invalided home after years at a leper colony in Uganda, not for his health's sake but because he has gone native...

...Moreover, it is not inconsistent with Balanchine's Petipan prototypes...

...Even so, there is some residual charm to Gramps's trapping death up the tree so that he can stick around and protect his grandson from the clutches of his greedy, dogoody Aunt Demetria, and to the defeat/triumph of an ending in which the principals die happily...

...It is Michael's remembered dancing music that does the wanning...

...The stage effects included a stunning locomotive that surges out of the darkness of the Russian night...

...The more important if less elegant dance to music from Marconi comes at the end of the first act when a vigorous Irish tune pulls first one, then another of the sisters into a mad dance until finally Kate (Rosaleen Linehan) breaks out, joining the others in a moment that is at once a cry of joy and a revolution against the rigidities and the poverty that smother them...

...He is a pleasure to watch, but his Gramps is more a collection of actor's tricks than a real character...

...k ot long after the remembered Mundy summer, in the unreal real world of Broadway, an amiably sentimental comedy opened...

...The painful events of that summer, clouded by the long look back, allow Michael/Friel at once to warm and chill the audience...

...The conception of that piece was too lyrical and dramatized for eyes raised on the New York City Ballet's more athletic style...

...Michael's memory catches the Mundy sisters at the moment of disruption, but as the grown man remembers what the boy of seven saw they are still a functioning group...

...STAGE THE MUSIC OF MEMORY 'DANCING' & 'BORROWED TIME' 6 n memory everything seems to happen to music," says Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie...

...The dancing for the entire engagement was solid to good, with the exception of the rocky and imprecise beginning of the opening-night Balanchine...

...Michael, who is to Friel as Tom is to Tennessee Williams, has a lyric speech at the end of the play recalling "a dream music that is both heard and imagined," but he goes Tom one better for "when I remember it, I think of it as dancing...

...Aggie (Brid Brennan) and Gerry (Robert Gwilym) do a marvelous dance to "Anything Goes," and he and Chris (Catherine Byrne) move romantically through "Dancing in the Dark...

...This is a real Lughnasa dance, for Lughnasa is a harvest festival with its roots in pre-Christian Ireland which 718: Commonweal the savages in the hills, as Kate calls her more unbuttoned neighbors, celebrate with dance and drink and animal sacrifice...

...He twinkles, he grimaces, he hesitates slyly, he pauses naughtily...

...Gerry, Michael's father, wanders in and out, his feckless Welsh charm creating tensions among the women, particularly between Chris, Michael's mother, and Aggie...

...That is where Dancing in Lughnasa is seated, which is what touches audiences...

...Yet, audiences who take On Borrowed Time with a Mundy grain of salt may still find bits of it to their taste...

...Memory omits and exaggerates, Williams says, because it "is seated predominantly in the heart...

...I assume, however, that it was not these tepid virtues that led to the revival at the Circle in the Square...