[In the review below, Henry claims that Dancing at Lughnasa evokes great joy as well as sadness, and states that although Friel has been influenced by Chekhov, this work is one of "authentic originality. "]

A good dramatist defines a theme, shapes a story to illu-mine it and moves clearly and logically toward an emotionally satisfying conclusion. A great dramatist can make quicksilver leaps from theme to theme, fragment a story into seemingly disparate shards and play games with character and chronology, yet achieve a conclusion that is even more emotionally satisfying because of the sense of surprise and revelation in how it all comes together. For more than three decades, in such works as Aristocrats and Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Ireland's Brian Friel has been a good dramatist. In Dancing at Lughnasa, which opened on Broadway last week, he has become a great one.

The title refers to a merry harvest festival in County Donegal. But the action never leaves the cottage and yard of the five Mundy sisters, living poor and unmarried in tumbledown Ballybeg in the hard year of 1936, with no entertainment but a balky old radio and their Celtic gift for chat. The play is a memory play, told as flashbacks from the present by a middle-aged man who was then a boy of seven. He is the illegitimate son of the most rebellious Mundy sister by a wandering wastrel who, after years away, comes to call. The Mundy women live in memory too, of better days and higher hopes. So does their weary brother Jack, a defrocked priest sent home from his mission in Africa for embracing local gods and customs. Suffused through the background are the inescapable memories of Ireland: pagan revelry and medieval Christian learning, invasion and oppression, the landlord's power and the peasant's scorn.

From all this Friel evokes great sadness, made sadder still by hints and outright warnings from the narrator about what else will befall the beleaguered clan in the half-century between the time he recalls and the time he now inhabits. Yet the play also evokes great joy, in small but vivid exchanges of everyday talk and, most boldly, when the sisters erupt, at home and alone, in the life-embracing energy with which they might once again have danced at Lughnasa.

The cast members, from Dublin's Abbey Theater, are amazingly fresh and spontaneous in roles that half of them have been playing since April 1990, when the play premiered in Ireland. Yet the performances also have the delicacy and nuance that comes from long consideration. They suggest all the tacit tolerance, the willful blindness, that makes family life possible, and also the tragic inevitability that even inside a household there will be competition, and some survivors will prove fitter than others.

In a lifetime of theatergoing one would be lucky to see a dozen ensembles this good or any that are better. Gerard McSorley has just the right grave detachment in both the narrator's long speeches and the round-eyed, wondering queries of a small boy. But the most memorable player is the one who has least to do. As the kindest and most dutiful sister, Brid Brennan sits at her knitting, soon to be rendered useless by machines, with a soft look of utter absence in her eyes.

Friel has been much influenced by Chekhov. Aristocrats was unabashedly Chekhovian, a sort of Ballybeg version of The Cherry Orchard. But Chekhov never attempted anything like Lughnasa's narrative complexity, and never wrote so richly about the unprivileged. This time there are no echoes of homage in Friel's work, just authentic originality.

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