Received wisdom Tuning in to the world BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Dancing at Lughnasa By Brian Friel. Directed by Tony Reilly. Produced by the American Irish Repertory Ensemble in the Studio Theater at the Portland Performing Arts Center, through May 22. Call (207) 799-5327.

Marconi, the new wireless in the Mundy sisters’ household, is a flighty machine, picking up music from the airwaves and then losing it again with near-human whimsy. But this is exciting new technology anyway for the five women in the tiny Irish village of Balleybeg. As their radio brings both familiar Irish fiddling and the far-off strains of Cole Porter into their late summer, the sisters are electrified despite its fits and starts. Their reception of change and the larger world into their traditional lives is the meat of Dancing at Lughnasa, the Tony Award-winning play by Brian Friel, directed by Tony Reilly for the American Irish Repertory Ensemble.

We’re transported to the estrogen-rich Mundy house via the expansive memory of Michael (Tony Reilly), a son born out of wedlock to Christina Mundy (Janice Gardner). The grown Michael narrates us back to his youth in 1936 during the days of Lughnasa, Ireland’s ancient harvest festival. As usual, the "pagans of the back hills" are dancing around fires and drinking it up, and against these fervent celebration days are set other fraught circumstances for the Mundy women: Their brother Jack, a priest (endearing and ethereal in the hands of David Branch), has just returned stunned and changed after spending 25 years in a Uganda leper colony, and Michael’s father Gerry (charismatic Mark Evans) has unexpectedly come into to town for a visit.

Michael’s mom and aunts are gals to be reckoned with, and they react differently but with high vigor to the incidents of their August. Director Reilly has a strong cast of women to work with, and their portrayals are robust. Eldest sisters Kate and Maggie (the mighty duo of Maureen Butler and Susan Reilly) make a fine contrast in filial foils: Devout and disapproving, with eyes and voice weighted with reproach, Kate is spooked by the "pagan" beliefs her brother picked up in Africa; for rollicking, cackling Maggie, anything goes. Christina rises and falls to the rhythms of Gerry’s promises and fine box-step, and Gardner lends her swoons a smarting self-knowledge beneath the abandon. Agnes (acute Amy Roche) is a watcher of the household as she knits, and meanwhile, the childlike Rose (Janet Lynch, with a beguiling, woodsy wildness) sneaks off with local boy Danny to watch the last of the Lughnasa fires burn.

Those ritual flames off in the hills are an old symbol of the friction between ancient and Christian Ireland, and in Dancing they signal even more: the confrontation of these small-town women with change and with the wider world. In the conflagrations that follow, both secular and sacred rituals cross cultures to share strange beds and lovely staging. As Christina and Jack dance to "Anything Goes" out in the yard, Michael steps in from the future to describe in detail just how they moved and held each other, while across the stage Jack turns in his own circle, chanting in Swahili. In Uganda, Jack tells Kate (who wants him to start saying Mass again), there was "no distinction between the religious and the secular." Jack is spurned by their congregation as having "gone native," but his words strike a chord as the house — and Ireland herself — receive more and more broadcasts of worldly popular culture. The Mundy’s wireless still has sketchy reception, but Kate yet has cause to announce that "radio has killed all Christian conversation in the country."

Friel’s play is a semi-autobiographical look back at this very transitional moment in the history of a family and Ireland, and nostalgia is the currency of Dancing in both style and design. This is not a play of action, but rather the slower lyricism of memory, character, and mood. In Michael’s remembrance of the summer of 1936, as he says, "atmosphere was more real than incident." True to this spirit, both the script and AIRE’s rendering of it give the senses a lot to linger on. The Mundy’s kitchen of clapboard floors and furnishings brims with tin buckets and pitchers, copper and cast-iron kettles, bright blue and red ceramic, and wicker baskets.

Characters break into song, punctuate conversations with loud claps, and laugh richly, often with the bigger-than-life volume that a boy’s memory would raise. As you might suspect, they also dance — old Irish and newer ballroom — and AIRE’s choreographers do well in making their movements rousing both for their own sake and for the cultures they recall.

Like memory, AIRE’s latest production moves slowly and lovingly. There are times when the pace feels almost too indulgent, but then come the vivid snaps — Maggie abruptly raising her voice in song, the feeble Jack suddenly ablaze with a memory of Africa, the flash of Christina’s eyes as she turns in Gerry’s arms. The momentum of the play is a well executed mirror of remembrance, which tunes in to certain of its signals with particularly stunning reception.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com