By KEVIN KELL O'DONNELL

"I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know the world is going to break your heart eventually."
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, upon hearing of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Brian Friel (Photo by Bobbie Hanvey)

Although Brian Friel's play Translations takes place in a small, rural community in the county of Donegal, Ireland, and deals with the violent and complex relationship between the Irish and the British, it is by no means simply "an Irish play." In the same way that Moynihan's quite personal comment about the Irish experience is actually a truism about the human experience, Translations is, at its core, about our collective relationship to language.

What does it mean to have the names of places around you—towns, beaches, lakes—suddenly changed? With the changing of a name, does the thing itself change? Is there a choice in this? Are words themselves, their sounds—vowels, consonants, length, pitch—the things that give an object meaning? Or is it the images behind the sound that contain the stuff of life? If so, can these images survive under new words? What happens when these images are not renewed, re-examined, and re-applied? Hugh, a character in the piece, arrives at a conclusion: "We fossilize."

The play takes place in 1833, in a Hedge School in the small town of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland, run by Hugh Mor O'Donnell. He is an astute, fast-thinking, frequently inebriated man who teaches the townspeople reading and writing in Irish, Greek, and Latin; arithmetic; and, in his own way, history. The people speak only Gaelic, or Irish in Ballybeg (with the exception of Hugh and his son Manus, who also speak English). Manus, who serves as Hugh's dedicated and reliable assistant, suffers from a crippled leg. Among the students, Jimmy Jack Cassie, in his 60s and still called "the infant prodigy," has practically memorized the books of Homer and Virgil, and lives a life that teeters between zealous academic pursuit and complete fantastical delusion. He's there for the intellectual stimulation and the company. Doalty, a young farmer from the town, and Bridget, a young countrywoman, round out the group, along with Sarah, a student with a severe speech deficiency. Maire, who also works on a farm, studies the school's atlas and dreams of moving to America. She desperately wants to learn English, a language that has been consciously overlooked by Hugh and Manus in their curriculum. This is Ireland, and the people should be speaking Irish, Hugh and Manus seem to communicate by their silence when Maire makes her plea. Friel has set up a wonderful theatrical device in the piece: While the people of Ballybeg are indeed speaking English on the stage, they are, in the world of the play, actually speaking Irish to each other.

As the play opens, we learn that the British army has arrived in Ballybeg with the singular mission of creating a new map of Ireland. Two officers, Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland, pay a visit to the school, accompanied by a translator, Owen O'Donnell (coincidentally Hugh's younger son, who has returned home from Dublin after six years). Hired by the army to communicate with the local people, Owen will also assist Yolland in renaming the places for the new map. They must "take each of the Gaelic names—every hill, stream, rock, even every patch of ground which possessed its own distinctive Irish name—and Anglicize it, either by changing it into its approximate English sound or by translating it into English words," explains Friel in his stage directions for the play. The changing of the names becomes a metaphor for the actual transformation of Ireland itself.

The play focuses on a very specific point in history, when Irish society, both individually and collectively, is forced either to accept an oppressor's implemented culture or retreat into the native way of life, as a means of security and resistance. But the blanket of Irish culture is full of holes—big holes—and the English government has torn the blanket. Two hundred years earlier, in 1649, Oliver Cromwell released a furious and bloody campaign to massacre or deport native Irish. Families were forced onto land in the west that was rocky and barren, to make room for the wealthy Protestant English. Two hundred years of failed uprisings and isolated clashes followed. The Irish made due with what they had, relying on a tough, dependable crop above all others: the potato.

As Friel's play begins, the acquisition of basic necessities and day-to-day survival have taken first priority—but the Gaelic language has actually thrived. As Hugh says, in response to Yolland's enthusiastic inquiries about the beauty of Gaelic: "Indeed, Lieutenant. A rich language. A rich literature. You'll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on the vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. I suppose you could call us a spiritual people … It is a … language full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception—a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to … inevitabilities." To leave behind Gaelic and begin speaking English is more than an issue of switching language; it's about moving into an entirely different reality.

Brian Friel, Translations Directed by Richard Feldman Drama Theater Thursday, Nov. 20–Monday, Nov. 24 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

Translations was first performed by Field Day Theater Company (a group formed by Friel and the Irish actor Stephen Rea) in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1980. It was immediately recognized as a brilliant and important piece of work and has since been performance in Dublin, London, and New York.

Brian Friel was born in Omagh, County Tyrone, in 1929. When he was 10, his father, a schoolteacher, moved the family to Derry in the north. His father's family is from County Donegal, in the northwest, a place that Friel has always had an attachment to. It represented a sort of paradise or Eden away from the city life of his youth, and it is no coincidence that Translations is set there. Friel is careful not to romanticize or sentimentalize the Donegal of 1833, which indeed has real problems: poverty, inadequate medical supplies, illiteracy. He leaves the romanticizing of the countryside to the outsider: the Englishman, Lieutenant Yolland.

Like Chekhov, Friel has a deep love for and understanding of each character and the choices they make. He understands the conflicted soul—the person who desires to remain faithful to his past, but also knows it can swallow him forever. "We must learn those new names," says Hugh, referring to the new, anglicized place-names. Hugh comes to this realization after hearing Jimmy Jack's drunken confession that he intends to marry the goddess Athene. Jimmy's eerie proclamation alerts Hugh to the dark side of remaining isolated from a culture and a language (English) that is becoming, for better or for worse, a part of Irish life. Though acquired through war, death, and imperialism, its influence is alive and growing even in tiny Ballybeg. Hugh's next statement will be echoed 12 years later, as thousands of Irish make the decision to leave their homeland in the Great Famine (1845-1849) to risk their lives on the treacherous Atlantic voyage to the New World: "We must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new home."

Indeed, the Irish will, in the next century, learn how to make this foreign language their own. Within 50 years of the Famine, Ireland will become the leading force of literary art in the world. The 20th century saw, chronologically, Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney win Nobel Prizes for literature. The fact that most people assume that Joyce, Wilde, and O'Casey also won the prize is not surprising.

The theme of making a foreign language your own is, obviously, a universal one. The director of Juilliard's production of Translations, Richard Feldman, shared with the cast that his own grandparents spoke Yiddish. Although English may not have been his family's first language, he says he has "just as much a right to count Shakespeare as part of my heritage as someone whose family has been speaking English for centuries."

Feldman expressed particular excitement about the dynamics and challenges the actors will face in performing this piece. "Like all great Irish and English writers, Friel balances scenes of deeply felt passion and emotion with very detailed and complex thinking. There are many, many elements being expressed at once."

Given the wide range of ethnic backgrounds within the cast, the elements of the piece will undoubtedly resonate in new and exciting ways. The themes of cultural loss, the desire to belong, the power of romantic love to cut beyond class and even language, and the inevitability of change have hooked the cast from the first reading. By opening night, this production should be an exciting and important evening of theater.

Kevin Kell O'Donnell, a fourth-year drama student, plays the role of Lieutenant Yolland in Translations. His play No More Static premiered at the Guthrie Lab in July, and will be published later this year by Smith and Kraus in a collection titled Ten-Minute Plays for 3 or More Actors: The Best of 2002/2003.