For the BarnArts outdoor production of Dancing at Lughnasa in Woodstock, the audience faces a grassy field and a distant, ancient tree. The grass ripples behind a platform casually strung with bare-filament lights. A County Donegal cottage is drawn in tables and chairs; its garden is the grass extending from beneath the stage to our feet. Birdsong floats on the wind as eight actors walk in to embody the memories of a narrator conjuring up his childhood.
Brian Friel’s largely autobiographical 1990 play is a lyrical immersion in 1936 rural Ireland. Five unmarried sisters share a small cottage and still smaller pleasures. Maggie loves her cheap Woodbine cigarettes; Rose gobbles billberries for the few weeks they’re in season; Kate reads every word of the newspaper. They all enjoy music on the radio, but their wireless overheats and entertains them only in short, miraculous bursts. Agnes craves romance novels, and Chris, the youngest, still loves dancing.
Actually, they all still love dancing, but they’re no longer girls who can enjoy such things. Now they stretch their meager earnings to care for their much older brother, Jack, a priest returned from 25 years in an African leper colony where pagan rituals left a deeper imprint on him than Catholicism. And growing up in their midst is 7-year-old Michael, Chris’ son. Gerry, the father who walked out on them both, makes rare, unannounced visits, hoping his grin remains irresistible enough to compensate for his desertion.
Tough as conditions are in the summer that the grown-up Michael recalls as our narrator, life will worsen for these women. The play occurs inside Michael’s frame of memory, his comments delivered beside action that includes characters speaking to his 7-year-old self, who is only an imaginary presence onstage. The narration usually sets up the events we witness, but it can also leap ahead to give us a bittersweet perspective on the hopes the characters still maintain.
The cast tackles a nuanced play and its Irish accents and delivers evocative performances.
The BarnArts production, directed by Dory Psomas, is excellent community theater. The cast tackles a nuanced play and its Irish accents and delivers evocative performances. Dancing at Lughnasa is a wonderful choice for the company’s annual outdoor show, with the setting itself supplying the lazy summer clouds to stir the viewer’s own sense of reverie.
The story portrays quiet heartache and the resolution of women who’ve failed the one great test of marrying and now pass their lives caring for each other as best they can. Through focus on the everyday, Friel’s best-known play shows memory crystallizing minor incidents into a sweeping understanding of each character’s life.
Maggie, played with thrilling, roguish energy by Kimberly Chu, is the glue of the household, smoothing over troubles with humor or doling out attentiveness when someone needs comforting. As for her own sorrows, Maggie can sink into private jealousy of a high school friend’s success, but once the wireless crackles to life, she looks up from making soda bread to pat her cheeks white with flour and release her regrets in dance.
Kate, the eldest, is a schoolteacher who has assumed the burden of financial responsibility for the family. As a devout Catholic, she takes a pride in Father Jack that shifts to humiliation as he loses his faith in favor of the unbridled emotion he found in African customs. Killian White presents all of Kate’s righteousness and a hint of her pain, and Scott Magnuson portrays Jack’s halting search for the English words he’s lost to Swahili.
The script is subtle about Rose’s social and intellectual limitations, but Kaetlyn Collins gives her pure grins and grimaces that reveal a wild impulsiveness. Petulant or zealous, Rose always engenders warmth from her sisters. Agnes, Rose’s principal protector, has gotten them both work as cottage knitters, producing gloves for a pittance. Eleanor Reid brings intensity to the role, head down to knit but eyes secretly up to watch Gerry with silent longing.
Gerry is a born sweet-talker, and Kevin Donohue portrays him as a pretender who’s convinced himself he’s telling the truth. He wants to succeed as a traveling salesman, wants to offer Chris and Michael a future. But Gerry is only good at wishing, and all he can offer Chris is the joy of dancing in the garden. Beatrice Scott, as Chris, holds herself stick straight to fend off Gerry’s charm but finally can’t help loosening herself into his arms to dance.
Friel’s sketches distill people through brief moments. The narration has a watercolor’s looseness, blurring the depth of time to let simple events summarize whole lives. Jabez Hammond, as Michael, narrates dispassionately yet betrays a sweet compulsion to tell these stories, to share and preserve these people. Small incidents become wide windows into the family he remembers, and Hammond holds a gentle power over the audience.
The play is built of small gestures, just as memories fasten on small details. The firm face of Chris finally melting to Gerry’s grand talk. Kate collapsing with Maggie as she imagines Rose’s future. Michael standing inside his own memories. The whole family waiting to see how Maggie will stretch three eggs into a meal for them all, listening to her proclaim, “I’m feeling very creative tonight!”
As the wind sways a tree’s branches and the sisters’ aprons, the characters seem summoned from the narrator’s memory to come to life again in a blazing present. They live hard lives yet find dignity and the capacity for joy. The boy who grew up among them formed his memories of their courage because he felt their love, and that love flickers in his voice and seems to ride the breeze as well. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Family Matters | Theater review: Dancing at Lughnasa, BarnArts”
This article appears in June 24 • 2026.
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