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Returning to 'Philadelphia' at a Carefully Measured Pace
by Jan Stuart
Newsday
September 9, 1994
Philadelphia, Here I Come! By Brian Friel. Directed by Joe Dowling. Scene design by John Lee Beatty. Costume design by Catherine Zuber. Lighting design by Christopher Akerlind. Sound design by Philip Campanella. With Pauline Flanagan, Robert Sean Leonard, Milo O'Shea and Jim True. The Roundabout Theater Company at the Criterion Center Stage.
As Broadway hems and haws its way toward a fall season, the canonization of Brian Friel resumes. Enthralled as we are by any playwright who venerates the English language without benefit of big stars and still gets produced, we overpraise him ("Aristocrats"), we reappraise him ("The Faith Healer"), we see him through thick ("Dancing at Lughnasa") and thin ("Wonderful Tennessee"). If that weren't enough, we sound the royal trumpets from across the Atlantic to announce the latest blessed event ("Molly Sweeney") and nudge American producers to pull out their checkbooks.
Until Molly arrives and the glorious "Translations" makes its spring Broadway debut, we should mute the horns for the Roundabout revival of "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" the hit play that put Friel on the New York map in 1966. Reflecting the current atmosphere of Frielmania, Joe Dowling's staging is meticulous to the point of being stately - almost processional - in its effects.
Stately is an odd state in which to find "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" Written while the playwright was in his feisty mid-30s, it's a young man's play: sanguine and smartassed, burning with a young man's expectations and more than a little enamored of its own cheek. It's also incredibly sad, riddled with the rueful echoes of important things left unsaid when a grown child leaps out of the family nest and into God-knows-what. You remember the silences more than the sass this time out, in part due to the quiet power of an actor named Jim True. A member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Company, True gives a performance of aching humility and authenticity as Gareth O'Donnell, an unremarkable 25-year-old County Donegal native trying to make peace with his past before he abandons Ireland to live with relatives in the States. The only child of a dry-goods vendor (sweetly underplayed by Milo O'Shea), Gar is rarely alone on stage, since Friel has seen fit to have another actor trail him as Gar's alter ego.
Since this private Gar (played here by a vivacious Robert Sean Leonard) says all the tough, often rotten things we can't bring ourselves to say in people's faces, it is necessarily the flashier role of the two. The character's theatrical horseplay was no doubt favored in the glib arena of 1960s Broadway; one can imagine a young Robin Williams having a go with his improvisational riffs. Leonard (a knockout Marchbanks in Roundabout's 1992 "Candida") is a serious comic actor who, despite a lingering trace of collegiate garrulousness, puts a thoughtful spin on the inner Gar's show-offy tendencies.
Leonard's sensitive extroversion complements True's stammering introversion: think of vaudevillian Ted Lewis doing "Me and My Shadow" with James Dean. There is something oddly subdued about the whole evening, including John Lee Beatty's dullish two-level set, as if everyone in it were succumbing to the clenched melancholy of the two leads. Joe Dowling's overdeliberate pacing, which tends to taffy-stretch everything from pauses to blackouts, points up Friel's arduously schematic organization, as Gar closes off in turn with his ex-girlfriend, his drinking mates, a former teacher who might have been his father, the town cleric and, finally, his tongue-tied father.
In the good, convincingly Irish ensemble, Aideen O'Kelly does a memorable turn as Gar's blowsy Aunt Lizzy, while the redoubtable Pauline Flanagan is surprisingly bland as Madge, the O'Donnells' devoted housekeeper and one of the few characters in the play with her public and private side healthily in synch. As Brian Friel's private side continues to emerge in a prolific outpouring of Irish rhapsody, "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" may or may not weigh in as the great play we had once thought it. In the reverential Roundabout staging, at least, we want to be swept away but get stuck instead in a quagmire of admiration.
