Translations

A behind the scenes take on Translations, the Brien Friel play, ahead of its 1995 Broadway opening, and a trip to the Boston preview.

In the bare rehearsal room a few chairs and a desk represented the hedge school of Brian Friel’s Translations. Brian Dennehy as Master Hugh O’Donnell entered not from the wings but from a card table where he had been drinking coffee and visiting with the other cast members. My usual reaction to seeing an actor familiar from the movies or television at close quarters is surprise at how much smaller they seem. But reality diminishes Brian Dennehy not at all. His broad shouldered presence so familiar from films such as Presumed Innocent and Cocoon dominates the area designated as the schoolroom. Dana Delany is also familiar. In the innovative series China Beach, she created the role of a battle weary nurse in Vietnam and has appeared in movies such as Tombstone and Housesitter. But now she is Maire, the student who follows the Master’s classical curriculum reluctantly and dares to ask that he teach the alien but useful language of English.

It’s 1833 and English soldiers are mapping that area of Donegal which Brian Friel has made his own. He has explored the mythical area around Ballybeg in plays such as Dancing at Lughnasa, Philadelphia, Here I Come, Making History, Wonderful Tennessee. He has traveled through time to unpack that particular area of Ireland.

I am reminded of the opening scene of The Tain, Ireland’s epic poem, where two scholars of ancient Ireland travel to a certain place–the Cooley peninsula, to hear the tale of the great cattle raid as told by Fergus, one of the participants. Like them, Brian Friel conjures up characters from the past of his special landscape to reveal both the history of the place and the personal struggles of the people who lived there. Brian Friel’s plays are, to quote Donal Donnelly who, as the elderly bachelor Jimmy Jack courts the goddess Athena in the hills around Ballybeg, “dense and many-layered.” Translations offers a particularly rich dimension for Irish-Americans since Brian Dennehy and Dana Delany are American. Both are descendants of the immigrants who will be forced to leave the country Friel re-imagines. For the villagers of Translations the threat of famine hovers. They fear that “the sweet smell” of potato stalks rotting which has signalled disaster in other parts of Ireland will devastate their village. Most immediately their spiritual existence is threatened as the English cartographer renames the townlands, cutting roots that tap into thousands of years of memories.

Brian Friel’s play captures that moment right before the combination of starvation and imperialism laid waste to Gaelic Ireland and made our ancestors immigrants. Now Dennehy, whose grandfather came to the U.S. from Mill Street in County Cork and Delany whose father’s family traces its origins to the West of Ireland, have the chance to experience this time before displacement.

For Brian Dennehy, who maintains a home on the Beara peninsula and knows modern Ireland, the past is a problematic country. He grew up with two very different interpretations of Irish history. His grandfather, the immigrant, embraced America and was glad to escape the pain of his early life. His father, however, loved the Ireland of his imagination. Dennehy discussed this double message and how it mirrored the dilemma his character, the Master, faces in Translations in an interview for Irish America during preparations for the Broadway opening of Translations on March 19 at the Plymouth Theater.

“The interesting thing about being Irish-American is that the real melancholy of Irishness comes from the American element, not so much from the Irish. It was my father who was born here who experienced a sense of separation, of being part of the diaspora. My grandfather, who left in the 1880s from Mill Street in Cork had suffered so much as a kid that he had no sentimental attachment to Ireland. My father was the one who did.

“I’ve always had an interest in my Irishness but it’s been much more dispassionate that either one of those two. I wasn’t as scarred by it as my grandfather. I wasn’t as romantically involved in it as my father was, though I love being in Ireland. I like the people, even the climate. My grandfather had no interest in going back. The ‘Emerald Isle’ held no attraction for him because he had such terrible experiences growing up there. He loved the United States because he could work here and build a life and have a home and property–all of which were denied to him in Ireland at the time. He just had no idea why anyone would want to go back to Ireland. He would say, ‘Anything I’ve ever gotten I’ve gotten here, not there.’

“I’m sure that for him that was true just as I’m sure that for my father there was the sense of a lost chord, a lost melody. I come down somewhere in the middle. I appreciate the Irish and I enjoy being in Ireland but I’m thoroughly American.”

Dennehy sees in Friel’s play an echo of the doubleness most Irish-Americans experience. The loss of the language and the culture is tragic and yet the demands of the present must be met.

“My character,” Dennehy said, “describes the Irish language as, ‘full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception. A syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes. Our only method of dealing with inevitabilities.’ Leaders such as de Valera might have felt that culture was what they could offer people who had little else. But the contemporary Irish say around Dublin are much more practical–it’s in the West where you still feel the sense of otherness. You can go into a pub in Donegal and find everyone speaking Irish.”

For Dana Delany, portraying Maire became a course in Irish History. “I went out and got all these books and started reading at night, discovering all this history I didn’t know,” Delany says. “I like to think that my character echoes an earlier Irish woman Maire O’Brien, who was married to a soldier who fought Cromwell. He was killed, then she married one of Cromwell’s men and became rich. My character is like her, practical. She has things to do in her life.”

It is Maire who falls in love with Lieutenant Yolland, the English soldier who is translating Ballybeg’s history away. Yet Yolland is described by Owen O’Donnell, son of the Master, played by Rufus Sewell who recently starred in Middlemarch, as a “Hibernophile.” “He loves us.”

Like Maire, Owen worries about his own individual life and is willing to lend his services to the English. He justifies his role by presenting the survey as a way to make taxation more equitable. And the names? Well, they have been changed, corrupted and mispronounced so much over the centuries, what difference does one more translation make? If anything, English place names offer a way in for “Hibernophiles” such as Lt. Yolland. But Jimmy Jack, pondering the difficulties of his proposed marriage to a goddess, warns of the dangers of marrying outside of the tribe. Indeed the love between Yolland and Maire brings disaster and the same officer Ballybeg offers its hospitality to in the first scene threatens to destroy the village in the last.

Finally the “sweet smell” comes. Famine lays waste to the old ways. Survival means leaving Ballybeg.

“The Delanys came to the United States to escape the potato famine,” Dana Delany says. “My mother is English so I often say I have the struggle inside myself. Though I made my acting debut on Broadway in Hugh Leonard’s A Life in 1988 and I’ve visited Dublin, I’ve never been to the West so I feel I am just beginning to know Ireland.” For Delany, the language of Translations itself was a point of entry into that other world. “It’s poetic, it’s full. You have to be true to it. As I worked on the accent I felt the rhythms of Friel’s words. I felt very responsible to do it right.” Delany found in her character a quality she recognizes herself. “I always see the glass as half full. I rail against the ‘inevitabilities’. You don’t have to give in. Maire is like that. She will not be defeated. She will survive.”

In mid-February the descendants of those survivors crowded the Colonial Theater in Boston during Translations‘ soldout run. The bare rehearsal room became an evocative set on the stage of a gilded theatre. The rapt audience responded to the poetry, the pain and the humor that comes when the only possible response to the inevitable is to laugh. Certainly there were many theater goers who came to see the work of the man who has become one of the 20th century’s greatest dramatists. But others, the Irish Americans had more personal motives. “This is my history,” the woman next to me remarked, “and I know nothing about it.”

When Dancing at Lughnasa played on Broadway, actor Rosaleen Lenihan was visited backstage by a woman who had been taught by Brian Friel’s aunt, the model for Lenihan’s character Kate. The boundaries between fact and fiction, the past and the present can become very amorphous in Friel country.

Now Translations‘ stay on Broadway will provide those who feel the doubleness so endemic to the Irish, a chance to visit those places whose very names have been lost. Maire and Lt. Yolland communicate their love by reciting to each other a litany of place names neither really understands. But we have Brian Friel to guide us through the landscape of his imagination and the knowledge lost through time and dispossession can become available again.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the March/April 1995 issue of Irish America. ⬥