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An Irishman Divided - Sometimes, It Takes Two to Emigrate
by Robert Feldberg
The Record
September 9, 1994
PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME!: A Broadway revival, at the Roundabout Theater, 1530 Broadway. Written by Brian Friel. With Robert Sean Leonard, Milo O'Shea, and Jim True. Directed by Joe Dowling. $47.50. (212) 869-8400. Through Oct. 16.
"Philadelphia, Here I Come!" is a remarkably involving play. It's poetic and funny, but I think what grabs an audience most is Brian Friel's double vision of his characters.
The Irish playwright presents their flaws with a hard, if jaunty, clarity. He's too observant to be sentimental. Yet -- except for those of privilege, who are minor figures -- Friel also has an extraordinary sympathy for his characters, born of understanding. We laugh at the foibles of the residents of Ballybeg, while keenly feeling the sadness of their lives.
"Philadelphia," which opened in a fine revival Thursday night at the Roundabout Theater, established Friel as a writer 30 years ago and is still perhaps his loveliest and most entertaining play.
Gareth O'Donnell, Friel's 25-year-old hero, understands the dead-end life that will be his fate if he remains in his rural Donegal village.
He can't establish a relationship with his silent and distant father, a shopkeeper who employs Gar for meager wages. He spends his leisure time with friends who boast of their sexual adventures but are in reality overgrown, repressed boys, afraid to even approach women.
Most painfully, Gar has lost his girlfriend Kate. Too meek and insecure to ask her snobbish father for her hand, he's seen her married off to a doctor.
In many ways, Gar is as trapped by the limits of personality and the restrictive society in which he lives as the other inhabitants of Ballybeg, who include an alcoholic teacher and a platitude-spouting priest. But Friel has given Gar a second, private self, who says all the honest, spirited, outrageous things that the public Gar is thinking.
The public Gar is played by Jim True, an attractive, likable actor. It is, however, Robert Sean Leonard, a revelation as the private Gar, who's the major force in the production.
The Ridgewood native, who's alternated between the New York stage and such films as "The Age of Innocence," "Swing Kids," and "Dead Poets Society," has always been an intelligent, skilled young actor. But nothing he's done before would suggest the energy and flair for comedy he reveals here.
His private Gar has to keep the public Gar on track in his planned move to America.
He's been invited to live in Philadelphia by an aunt, his dead mother's sister. A loud, Americanized woman -- played with a nice comic edge by Aideen O'Kelly -- Aunt Lizzy hides her disappointment at being childless behind boastfulness and drink. Gar desperately wants the opportunity offered by America, but it's hard for him to leave Ballybeg, especially his father, although he understands "we embarrass each other."
The private Gar -- not seen or heard by anyone but the audience -- has a sharp eye and a wicked tongue, particularly when it comes to his uncommunicative father. Leonard skillfully mimics the old man's sparse dinner-table conversation, and provides a riotous commentary on his personal habits, such as removing his teeth during dinner. ("That's what we're waiting for!" Gar enthuses. "Complete informality!")
The closed minds and pinched routines of the town's other residents provide additional targets for the private Gar's purposeful humor, as does the public Gar's hopeless pining for Kate.
Leonard also pulls off the neat verbal trick of an American actor playing an Irishman -- with persuasive brogue -- imitating an American, as his Gar uses broad, flat American speech to extoll the wide-open spaces and willing women in the U.S.A.
Thanks to Leonard and director Joe Dowling, this is by far the most amusing production of "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" I've ever seen. Dowling, former artistic director of Dublin's Abbey Theater, thoroughly evokes the arid emotional landscape of Ballybeg.
Pauline Flanagan gives a rich, hearty performance as the O'Donnells' faithful ousekeeper, and Timothy Reynolds stands out as the most pathetic of Gar's friends. Milo O'Shea is generally effective as Gar's father, although, at the end, he warms up a bit too much, robbing the play of some closing bite.
The Roundabout has been making a habit in recent years of first-rate revivals, and this effort is near the top of the list.
