Translations BROADWAY REVIEWS

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Opening Night:: January 25, 2007
Closing:: March 11, 2007

Theater: Biltmore Theatre / 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY, 10036

Synopsis:

The play is set in the quiet community of Baile Beag (later anglicised to Ballybeg), in County Donegal, Ireland. Many of the inhabitants have little experience of the world outside the village. In spite of this, tales about Greek goddesses are as commonplace as those about the potato crops. Friel uses language as a tool to highlight the problems of communication — lingual, cultural, and generational. In the world of the play, the characters, both Irish and English, "speak" their respective languages, however English is predominantly spoken in the play. This allows the audience to understand all the languages, as if a translator were provided.

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NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Translations

Eloquent Tongues but Anguished Irish Hearts
Charles Isherwood

January 26, 2007: Quite a few languages are spoken in Brian Friel’s play “Translations.” There is a fair amount of Latin and Greek. Gaelic makes frequent appearances. And English is of course the play’s official lingua franca. But you can leave your Berlitzes and your dead-language primers at home. A basic fluency in the workings of the human heart is all that’s necessary to absorb the beauties of Mr. Friel’s tender, sad and funny play about the difficulty of finding a home in the world, a person to share it with, and a name to call it by.
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