Over the past two decades, Brian Friel has become one of Ireland's best-known playwrights. Following the example of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey, and others who were part of the flourishing literary movement at the turn of the century, and encouraged by the annual Dublin Theatre Festival, Friel has produced drama that is clearly indigenous to Ireland. In each of Friel's stage plays, Ireland not only provides the canvas upon which his largely rural characters are portrayed but also acts as a character itself. Friel's canon characterizes not only individuals but an entire people, whose hopes and disappointments play themselves out against a menacing undercurrent of violence and death. In nearly all his plays, the interplay of reality, memory, and dream suggests the spiritual flux of a people whose sense of tradition and place is frequently at war with contemporary realities. Yet even as Friel...