Daily Pioneer News

PLATTEVILLE - The University of Wisconsin-Platteville Department of Performing and Visual Arts and the Pioneer Players continue their fall theater season with Brian Friel's lyrical ode to the past, "Dancing at Lughnasa." The production opens with a matinee on Nov. 5 at 11 a.m. and continues through the week with evening performances. From Nov. 5 through Nov. 8, all performances will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Center for the Arts theater on the UWP campus.

"Dancing at Lughnasa" is a memory play, a drama with events that are presented as the recollections of an on-stage narrator, Michael Mundy, who looks back from the early 1960s to the summer of 1936. The setting is, on one level, in the mind of the narrator. What Mundy remembers and what we see on stage is "the home of the Mundy family, located two miles outside the village of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland." Friel's "interplay of reality, memory and dream suggests the spiritual flux of a people whose sense of tradition and place is frequently at war with contemporary realities."

The play weaves the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in this small, fictional village of Ballybeg. They are introduced at the time of the Festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colorful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world at large.

In 1936, when Mundy is only 7 years old, his elderly uncle - a priest - returns after serving for 25 years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. For the young boy, two other life-changing events occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio, with music that transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. Mundy also meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. Cracks develop from these events that ultimately destroy the foundation of the family. Widely regarded as Friel's masterpiece, this haunting play is his tribute to the spirit and valor of the past.

The eight-member cast includes Jared Baker, Kady Beekman, Jarod Boerst, Lizzie Hansen, Tiffany Hess, Molly Ilten, Sam Murn and Amanda Valiquette. All of them are veterans of previous plays and musicals at UWP. Scenic and lighting designs are by Brad Carlson, the theater program's technical director and designer, and Connie SaLoutos Furlan choreographed the dance interludes. David Schuler directs the production.

Winner of both Britain's Olivier Award and New York's Tony Award for Best Play, "Dancing at Lughnasa" was also chosen by Time magazine as one of the 10 best plays of 1991, saying it is "the most elegant and rueful memory play since "The Glass Menagerie" . . . this play does exactly what theater was born to do, carrying both its characters and audience aloft on those waves of distant music and ecstatic release that, in defiance of all language and logic, let us dance and dream just before night must fall." The New York Post said, "This is a play not to be missed - simply a wondrous experience. Experience it." "Dancing at Lughnasa" explores the theme of Irish identity under siege in a changing world. The play combines "reality, memory and dream" in a way that has become a hallmark of Friel's work as a playwright.

Tickets are available through the University Box Office located on the ground floor of Ullsvik Hall. Tickets are available by phone at (608) 342-1298 or at http://tickets.uwplatt.edu. Ticket prices are $7 general admission, $6 for UWP faculty and staff and $5 for senior citizens, individuals under the age of 18 and UWP students with a current ID. For more information regarding the performance, contact Schuler at (608) 342-1198 or schulerd@uwplatt.edu.

Contact and written by: David Schuler, Performing and Visual Arts, (608) 342- 1198, schulerd@uwplatt.edu Formatted by: Anne Killian, UWP Public Relations, (608) 342-1194, killiana@uwplatt.edu