Can you say home in a foreign language

For a little while, the audience actually feels a sense of triumph when Sarah, the soulful mute student at a rural Irish Hedge School circa 1830, speaks her first, broken sentence. "My name is Sarah," she forcefully asserts, and for a few brief moments it seems that any language barrier can be torn down with a little effort and a lot of emotion.

Translations

But the audience suddenly realizes that what the Irish Sarah is painstakingly learning will become extinct overnight. The new National School will bring English to Sarah's isolated parish, and, being ignorant in this new tongue, she will be speechless once again. Her miraculous progress is completely for naught.

Brian Friel's Translations is full of such thwarted triumphs, and the Yale Dramat's competent Ex production succeeds in illustrating the desperation and danger language barriers bring to a cluster of Irish students and, by extension, a culture. Though the production sometimes fails to overcome Friel's more clichéd theatrical conventions, the fine cast brings a sense of urgency to the material, making for an engrossing start to the new theater season.

Friel's drama describes the arrival of English soldiers to a remote section of Ireland as they attempt to create the first accurate map of the area. Making the map, however, means renaming places and eroding tradition, in addition to preparing the area for military occupation.

The English bring as their translator Owen (Brian Seibert, TD '97), an Irishman who made it big by adopting English culture and living abroad. Owen brings the soliders to his old home where his father (David Ries, JE '96) and brother (John Patrick Delury, ES '97) are tutors at a Hedge School, an impovershed institution teaching Latin, Greek, and math to local adults. As the characters find themselves unable to communicate with one another, Friel questions the essence of language and the relationships between names and souls, history, and culture, as well as living and learning.

Director Kellen Hertz, SM '97, is determined to give each issue in the script the gravity it deserves, and she succeeds in coaxing excellent performances out of her actors. What she does less successfully, however, is avoid some of the clichés inherent in Friel's text.

The situation of the brother who sells out confronting the brother who stuck to his ideals; the situation of a foreign soldier stealing a woman's heart; the situation of the beautiful mute girl with a heart of gold: at no time can Friel ever be accused of outrageous originality. Hertz's direction sometimes falls victim to this trap as well: in school scenes, the characters sit all in a row and stand when spoken to; monologues find actors walking downstage and addressing the audience while standing basically still; feuding lovers take single steps toward each other from opposite sides of the stage, meeting ever-so-cleanly in the middle. None of the stage pictures manage to match the fluctuating intensity of the languages that rages and debates onstage.

Another of the play's flaws is its lack of a true central character. Owen comes out of the closest, and Seibert plays his character with a convincing duality. Owen is eager to placate the English, who made him rich, but he still feels incredible ties to his native Irish culture. As his brother Manus, Delury is sometimes too softspoken to command the stage, but he has a wrenching glaze in his eyes when he finally confonts his own misery. Alexandra Tekerian, SM '98, as the mute Sarah, turns in a remarkably textured performance. Her infatuation with Manus, her ferocious drive to speak, and her fear of conflict are all conveyed in her layered facial expressions.

It is Adam Overett, SM '00, however, who is the crowd favorite. The one character Friel allows to be perpetually comic, Overett provides welcome humanity as the solider Yolland, who ignores the intellecutal debates in favor of falling in love. His romantic interest, Lisa Louttit, JE '97, gives another fine performance.

The set design, by novices Cathy Braasch, TD '99, and Jennifer Harris, DC '99, is remarkable in both its practicality and its reflection of the decaying Irish traditions. Braasch is in more familiar territory as the show's lighting designer, along with Cindy Bofetiado, JE '97. Merrit Lear's, TC '97, costumes are also well done.

The questions Friel raises in Translations are not easily answered. He is not simply lambasting the prevalence of English; after all, that's the language in which he writes. The great irony of Translations, in fact, is that even when the English soldiers can't understand the Irish farmers, the audience can: the only difference between the two groups as far as we're concerned is the different accents the actors are affecting.

"What does that word mean, `always?'" asks one character late in the play. This seems to be Friel's real question: what is more permanent, our language or our culture? Translations answers this query with another question: can one exist without the other?