[In the following review, Tracy considers the Dionysian motifs in Wonderful Tennessee and in some of Friel's other work.]

A Donegal pier fills the stage left to right, one of those long stone piers, walled on the seaward side, that are common all along the Irish coast. On this pier's two levels, Friel's six characters in search of a meaning pass the time, from late afternoon until 7:30 a.m., waiting to be ferried to the island they cannot see clearly: "Oileán Drafochta … Island of Otherness. Island of Mystery."

Stephen Dedalus defined a pier as a disappointed bridge. Friel's play is about disappointment, non-fulfillment, both actual and symbolic. None of his characters reach the island. Each is a study in failure. Terry is a professional gambler who has lost his luck, and, near the play's end, literally loses his shirt. His wife Berna is a lawyer, now deeply depressed and usually confined to a nursing home. Frank is an unsuccessful writer, at work on a coffee-table book clearly destined for the remainder table. He is married to Berna's sister, Angela, a classics lecturer who dislikes her profession; she seems to be having a muted affair with Terry. George, failed classical musician, is dying of cancer. He can only whisper, but plays heartbreakingly cheerful songs: "I Want to be Happy," "Jolly Good Company." Trish, his wife, is Terry's sister. They are all therefore an extended family, supported, at least until now, by Terry.

We glean these biographical details gradually, and, as it were, incidentally. Tolstoy tells us that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. These unhappy couples share a generic unhappiness that Friel wisely does not try to explain. He has eliminated most of the background information playwrights usually provide about each character's past. In Living Quarters, Translations, Making History, Dancing at Lughnasa, there is a kind of stage-manager/narrator who knows what happened, what is to happen. The characters in Wonderful Tennessee have to create and present themselves before our eyes, in their two acts/single night of existence, decking themselves with what scraps of background they have time for and consider absolutely essential.

This is partly dictated by the situation: they have all known each other for years, and can hardly exchange biographical information. But it is further dictated by the setting, between anywhere and a somewhere that may be nowhere. In the middle of life's journey they find themselves stranded. The bus has left, and they have missed the boat—or rather, the expected boatman, one Carlin, a thinly disguised Charon, fails to appear. Like Beckett's tramps they must pass the time, with songs, dances, telling stories.

Friel learned important lessons from Chekhov, but with Dancing at Lughnasa, and even more with Wonderful Tennessee, he is moving away from his mentor and reaching toward a new kind of play. Dancing at Lughnasa still retains some Chekhovian characteristics: five (not three) sisters trapped in a provincial backwater, an ineffective brother. Even the maenadic dancing of the Mundy sisters, at the play's most intensive moments, recalls the all-too-brief carnival night revels in Three Sisters. But Friel, as he distances himself from Field Day, seems also to be moving away from political drama, however implicit, and from his related—and Chekhovian—preoccupation with the use/misuse of language.

Much of Wonderful Tennessee depends on music and dance. George and his accordion replace Marconi, the intermittently working radio of Dancing at Lughnasa. George rarely speaks, but he constantly pours out music which interacts with the spoken dialogue and at times controls it: hymns, music hall songs, popular songs from the forties and fifties, even a bit from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and of course the American minstrel show song which gives Friel his title:

      Down by the cane-brake, close by the mill
      There lived a blue-eyed girl by the name of Nancy Dill.
      I told her that I loved her, I loved her very long,
      I'm going to serenade her and this will be my song: (Chorus)
      Come, my love, come, my boat lies low,
      She lies high and dry on the O-hi-o.
      Come my love, come, and come along with me,
      And I'll take you back to Tennessee.

There is some slight revisionism at work here: in the original, Nancy is "a colored gal," and the goal may be the Tennessee River, not the State.

We are back near the origins of drama, which began in dances invoking Dionysus, himself a dancing god. The characters of Wonderful Tennessee perform an impromptu but frenzied Conga line, "heads rolling, arms flying—a hint of the maenadic." Angela tells a story about Dionysus, who later becomes Saint Dionysus. We hear of a youth torn to bits in a maenadic orgy which is bloodlessly reenacted. If this play has a prototype, mistily hidden and hinted at like the elusive Island of Mystery, it is Euripides's Bacchae.

In Dancing at Lughnasa, Uncle Jack, cashiered missionary priest converted to the religion of the African tribe he came to Christianize, directs us to the pagan elements in rural Irish Catholicism, and we learn of mysterious Lughnasa rites—orgies—celebrated in the back hills. That pagan underlay is more hauntingly presented in Wonderful Tennessee, merging sinisterly with Catholic ritual. The elusive island was once a monastic settlement, later a place of pilgrimage at Lughnasa. But in June 1932, seven young men and seven young women, just back from the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, intoxicated by the splendors of the Congress, by perhaps too many references to the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood, and by poitin, tore one of their number, a young man, to pieces there.

The island is at once holy and dangerous, charged with the religious intensity of its ancient monks and the equal intensity of that 1932 sacrifice, at once pagan and Christian. No longer a place of pilgrimage, it has become unreachable, at least to the play's characters—the promised but perhaps unattainable Tennessee.

So far we are in a slightly more animated Beckett situation, where actors must perform to pass the time while they wait for an event that may never come. Something of Beckett's mistrust of language, of his yearning for a non-verbal drama, for silence, is already evident at the end of Dancing at Lughnasa, when Michael speaks of "Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement—as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness … Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary." In Wonderful Tennessee the island's mystery becomes, "Whatever it is we desire but can't express. What is beyond language. The inexpressible. The ineffable … Because there is no vocabulary for the experience. Because language stands baffled before all that … Or maybe [the old monks] did write it all down—without benefit of words! That's the only way it could be written … A book without words!"

Friel gives this speech to Frank, like himself a writer, a man of words. Friel does not yet have quite enough self-confidence to dispense—as Beckett dispenses—with symbols, to create the austere abstract drama he seems to crave, and to which both Dancing at Lughnasa and Wonderful Tennessee aspire. Here we are dazzled with symbols: blood sacrifice, a book about time, a voyage not taken, a cross, the invisible ferryman who controls access to that other place, the idea of pilgrimage. Berna talks about miracles and Angela gives a little lecture about the Eleusinian Mysteries. Wonderful Tennessee is, I suggest, a work in progress. By that I do not mean an incomplete work, though it is about an incomplete action. It represents a new direction in Friel's work. It anticipates, aspires toward some future play—perhaps his next, perhaps his next plus one—that will mark a new stage in Friel's development. We can only wait, and cheer him on.

A mystery cannot be put into words, as Angela reminds us in her Eleusinian lecture. But it can be acted—danced, performed, ritualized. Frank has his vision when he sees a dolphin dancing, "with a deliberate, controlled, exquisite abandon. Leaping, twisting, tumbling, gyrating in wild and intricate contortions … A performance so considered, so aware, that you knew it knew it was being witnessed, wanted to be witnessed. Thrilling; and wonderful; and at the same time … that manic, leering face … somehow very disturbing." It is at once the beauty and the terror that Dionysus embodied. The dolphin, Frank suggests, might be the spirit of the sacrificial victim, perhaps "searching for the other thirteen."

The play begins with the words, "Help! We're lost!" It ends with ritual and song, in an act of affirmation. This time the ritual sacrifice is bloodless. The others surround Terry, force him to the ground, and tear off his shirt. They hang part of the shirt on the pier's cruciform life-preserver stand, which, with its half-decayed life-preserver, already resembles a Celtic cross. The traditional Irish pilgrimage to a sacred well or mountain involves leaving some token of oneself, a coin, a rag, at the sacred spot. Here each member of the group formally hangs some possession—a bracelet, a scarf, a hat—on the cross/life-preserver stand, which is at once a symbol of death and of life, salvation, resurrection. Each one in turn performs a little ceremony, placing a stone atop a cairn, circling it, adding a second stone, circling again, touching his or her "votive offering" on the cross, then finally leaving the stage. All the while, George is again playing "Down by the cane-brake" in his "'sacred' style." George, who is to die, makes no offering, performs no ritual. He will not be coming back, as the others vow to do. But Angela places her hat on cross "for both of us." They will return yearly to repeat the ritual, and George will be affirmed, attested, in a wordless celebration of life over death, affirmation over negation, a pilgrimage "To remember again—to be reminded … To be in touch again—to attest." They will come, "Not out of need—out of desire! Not in expectation—but to attest, to affirm, to acknowledge—to shout Yes, Yes, Yes!"