A once-powerful clan gathers for a family wedding and muddles through the facts and fiction of their past and present.
On a summer lawn outside Ballybeg Hall, the O’Donnell siblings loll under lemony sunlight perfect for a family reunion. A wedding has lured back two of the émigrés among them, but Claire, the bride-to-be, has always lived at home.
Her intended is a local man, decades older, whom she does not love. A widower with young children he wants her to raise, he has promised her a car for Christmas, and days full of nothing to do. None of which matches the dreams she once had of channeling her musical talent into a performing career.
“He’s buying a piano so that I can teach the children to play,” Claire says, the flatness of her voice the barest camouflage for her anguish. “Maybe one of them will become a concert pianist?”
This is what the wan remnants of an Irish Catholic dynasty look like in Brian Friel’s play “Aristocrats,” set in the mid-1970s amid the tumbledown glamour of the O’Donnells’ grand old homestead, in the hills above Ballybeg, County Donegal.
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Source: Theater - nytimes.com
