Steve On Broadway (SOB)

The Home Place (The SOB Review)

The Home Place (The SOB Review) - McGuire Proscenium, Guthrie, Minneapolis, MN

**1/2 (out of ****)

Home may be where the heart is. Yet in Brian Friel’s meandering, albeit sometimes poignant new play The Home Place, the old adage that you can never go home again also rings true.

Arguably one of Ireland's foremost living playwrights, Friel has teamed up with fellow Irishman Joe Dowling, who directs the American premiere of this often stagnant period piece that is, if nothing else, visually stunning.

Frank Hallinan Flood's set design, which features a cross-section of an upper-crust Big House alongside a lush thicket, is so gorgeous that it upstages the action or lack thereof on the stage. In fact, when the curtain rises, it receives more sustained applause than the play itself.

That may be because what looks great on paper -- and armed with both a cursory knowledge of 19th Century Ireland and Friel's frequently poetic script, I found that it does read very well -- does not necessarily translate well to an American stage despite the fine performances by its ensemble.

Problematic is the static nature of the first half of the opening act. While Friel informs so much of the rest of The Home Place during this set-up, it’s a tedious slog under Dowling’s direction. Too many of the critical clues Friel sprinkles into it are lost.

Friel's story centers on Anglo-Irishman Christopher Gore (Simon Jones), who lords over a Victorian era Irish estate and Big House. Margaret (Sarah Agnew), the local Irish chatelaine who has worked for Christopher since her youth, sees her life in the Big House as a way to escape her inherited hardships.

Margaret’s embarrassed by the hard-drinking stereotype her father (Charles Keating) has become, yet she remains captivated by the familiar strains of her father’s choir singing a Thomas Moore hymn in the distance. Margaret can only enjoy the song from the sanctuary of her chosen adopted world.

Because of his ancestry, Christopher is a man without a country. For better or worse, Christopher's English roots threaten to betray him at a time when Irish tenants are asserting themselves. Margaret on the other hand has long since eschewed, if not betrayed, her roots. By falling in love with Christopher's son David, she aspires to become the lady of the Big House -- aware that Christopher has deep-rooted feelings for her, yet unaware of the impending sea change that history would not be on her side.

Quickening that change is a murder of another, more malevolent English landlord. It's spurring fears that there’s a list of other potential targets of Anglo lineage. Even though he himself is painted sympathetically, compounding Christopher’s fears is his brother Richard’s dubious, racist research on breeding.

Evocative of “Minority Report,” Richard (Richard S. Iglewski) expounds on how his research will lead to an exact science to help determine motives -- including those more sinister -- based on race. When he commences his research on some of the locals, a firestorm erupts that threatens Christopher and Margaret's notions of home.

While I have little doubt that Irish audiences were sufficiently moved by The Home Place, it only marginally connects on this side of pond. But when it does, particularly on the important points regarding where the heart is on the subject of "home," it does so profoundly.

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Labels: Brian Friel, Guthrie, Joe Dowling, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Play, The Home Place

posted by Steve On Broadway (SOB) @ Tuesday, October 09, 2007