Dancing At Lunasa

Published: March 8, 2020, 1:40 p.m.

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It is 1936, and harvest time in County Donegal. In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five Mundy sisters. In this extraordinary play, we meet these correct Catholic women at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. The man of the house \\u2013 seven year old Michael \\u2013 finally meets his elderly uncle, a priest, returning after serving for twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony, and watches as music from the radio transforms his mother and aunts into shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And in the same two days, who should turn up but Michael\\u2019s father, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields.

\\u201c\\u2026this play does exactly what theatre 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.\\u201d\\u2014NY Times.

Winner of the 1992 Tony Award for Best Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Broadway Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, Dancing at Lughnasa is widely regarded as Brian Friel\\u2019s masterpiece.

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