New Plays: Lovers

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The title is an umbrella for two amiable one-acters by Ireland's Brian Friel (Philadelphia, Here I Come!) that find tears in youthful exuberance and laughter in domestic conflict. In Winners, the curtain raiser, a betrothed young Irish couple joke and dream on a hilltop, planning their wedding, mocking the nuns and priests who have taught them. As they banter, a narrator (Art Carney), introduces a fragment of the future—the couple drown in a nearby lake. These are their last hours on earth, which take on new sweetness and meaning as the afternoon and their lives inexorably draw to a close.

In Losers, the second play, a middle-aged carpenter goes calling on a lady (Anna Manahan) with an outsize heart and a waist to match. Upstairs, her invalid mother sits clutching the bedclothes about her like a winding sheet, praying fanatically to St. Philomena, ringing a huge bell whenever the couple begin a furtive smooch. Marriage only makes things worse—until one day Carney spies a traumatic headline. Roaring drunk, he announces to the old crone that the Pope has quashed the cult of St. Philomena. Carney deposes a statue of the saint from its altar, insults his wife, and climbs into bed with his mother-in-law. Alas, the old lady soon finds a surrogate saint, the daughter is shocked and the carpenter is left to grow old disgracefully belowstairs.

Carney and his fellow actors create sporadic moments of ringing laughter and poignance. They are, in fact, better than the plays. Friel's language has a Gaelic thrust and lilt, but his lace-curtained Irish dramas could easily have been written three decades ago. Unfortunately, what was valid in the '30s seems pallid in the '60s.