Aristocrats

Is it just coincidence that, as America stares into the tinted glass of declining wealth, The Cherry Orchard is everywhere? Chekhov’s masterful study of aristocratic decay is currently at BAM. The play’s themes, transposed to the cultural key of modern Texas, were recently heard in Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate. And now the Irish Rep has revived Brian Friel’s lyrical, elegiacal 1980 drama Aristocrats, which pries up the floorboards of a dry-rotting clan in the rural town of Ballybeg.

The play unfurls at Ballybeg Hall, a grand and crumbling manse belonging to the O’Donnells, local Irish gentry. (Everyone refers to it as “the Big House.” The prison connotation is apt.) The family money is gone, and the mansion runs on fumes of its former glory. The patriarch lies upstairs, demented and dying, while his children gather in the garden below and catch up on their various desperate measures. Friel offers a gallery of sad portraits here: the manic-depressive Claire (Laura Odeh), a once-promising concert pianist; the bizarre Casimir (John Keating), a queer bird prone to wild lies; the alcoholic Alice (Orlagh Cassidy) and her disillusioned husband, Eamon (Ciarn O’Reilly). The writing is wonderfully observant and sympathetic, but in Charlotte Moore’s workmanlike production, it comes across without great elegance or energy. If you can fortify yourself in advance, however—a stiff mug of Irish coffee might do the trick—there is much to admire in Friel’s account of the fall of a family’s fortune.—Adam Feldman

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