Not Dancing But Drowning

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa dominated the 1992 Tony awards and this season will be the most produced play in the U.S., with at least 16 major regional stagings. The arrival of his new Wonderful Tennessee was a major Broadway event. Alas, so was its departure at week's end. A lesser work than Lughnasa, it failed because it is also a bleaker one. While Lughnasa portrayed in poignant detail the hard times of the five Mundy sisters in rural Ireland in 1937 and foreshadowed still worse things to befall them, the dominant memory it left was of the explosive eruption into revelry cited in the title. Amid reasons for sorrow, the Mundy women held onto joy. The three couples in Tennessee who come to the same lonely rural spot for a birthday outing seem defeated by ordinary travails. The one vital outburst, a passage from Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata played on the accordion, expresses rage as much as rapture and comes from a man who knows he is dying.

Tennessee is a variation on Lughnasa's themes: the intertwining of pagan and ) Christian traditions, the virtues and dangers of connecting with one's animal self, loneliness within family and marriage, the paralyzing loss of certainty in the modern world. But in Lughnasa themes emerged organically from storytelling. In Tennessee they are often clumsily declaimed. Moreover, the Dublin-derived ensemble did not create the illusion of long familiarity that the once-in-a-lifetime Lughnasa troupe did. As a bookie who plays sugar daddy to all the other characters, marvelous Donal McCann brought himself to feckless ruin with a crooked smile and a shrug for Ingrid Craigie as his despondent wife. Worthy on its own terms, Tennessee was bound to be seen on Lughnasa's instead. That was the ill luck of these Irish.