[In the following excerpt, O'Brien analyzes the geographical, cultural, social, psychological, and emotional expressions of distance in Philadelphia, Here I Come!]

Friel's greatest hit [Philadelphia, Here I Come.'] was first produced at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on 28 September 1964 and subsequently at the Helen Hayes Theater, New York, where beginning on 16 February 1966 it had a run of nine months; and the Lyric Theatre, in London's West End, where it opened on 21 September 1967. It has remained one of Friel's best-known and best-loved plays, has frequently been revived (most notably, perhaps, in an Abbey Theatre production in 1982), and represents the definitive breakthrough in his career, not only in terms of fame but also in terms of technique and theme.

The play is the first of Friel's to be set in the village of Ballybeg, though, as before, it is less the world in general that provides the setting as a family within that world. The family in question is the O'Donnells, consisting of S. B., a merchant, county councillor, and general pillar of the community; his son Gar; and a servant Madge (Mrs. O'Donnell is dead). Gar is the protagonist. The action takes place during his last night at home—he is off to Philadelphia in the morning—and largely consists of memories of Gar's past and projections of his future. Gar's incessant mental activity is interrupted by visits from friends and other members of the community, including Kate Doogan (now Mrs. King), the girl he did not have the nerve to marry.

Despite the presence of these visitors and the innovative (for Friel) use of flashback, the action is once again, as in The Enemy Within and The Blind Mice, conceived of as the articulation of the personality, rather than in terms of a dynamic, developmental interaction between an individual and his world. The conception works particularly well in this case, however, since the lack of physical activity as such draws attention to the limbo of waiting Gar has to endure before his new life can begin.

This state is explored to great effect and is the source of the play's most adventurous innovation, the portrayal of Gar by two actors, one playing Public Gar and the other Private Gar. Waiting to leave, negotiating the peculiarly suspended sense of himself evoked by the line "it's all over … And it's all about to begin," Gar is prey to indeterminacy, to the finality of choosing, to irreconcilable ambivalences. The line just quoted echoes analogous sentiments in The Enemy Within, and Philadelphia, with its themes of exile and family, community and selfhood, vulnerability and commitment, is that play's natural successor.

To underline the fact that the play's subject is not exile as such, or Ballybeg as such, but the implications of choosing one or the other, it ends not by showing Gar making a final commitment but with him saying "I don't know. II-I don't know." The play's ending offers an epiphanous crystallization of the condition it has been depicting. It is in the "sort of freedom" conferred by having to choose between two socially and culturally defined positions that Friel has found his theme, enabling Philadelphia, Here I Come! to be seen as one of the pivotal points in his play-writing career.

In addition, the ending draws attention to the play's relative lack of interest in narrative, or in events unfolding in a consistent manner toward a denoument. As D. E. S. Maxwell has noted: "The logic of the play is not in plot contrivance or 'what-happens-next,' but in its delicate montage of past and present experience and feeling" [Brian Friel, 1973]. This suppression of narrative and its teleology facilitates the complex and indeterminate use of time in the play, a use that in turn accommodates the conflicting presences of memory and desire in Gar's makeup. Thus the perception of Philadelphia as a career breakthrough, while rightly emphasizing the play's thematic and dramaturgical sophistication, should not overlook the play's subtle intellectual underpinnings.

The intellectual interest of Philadelphia is heavily disguised by the interest of its theme and the novelty of its stagecraft. Thematically speaking, it is possible to be misled by the geographical promise of the play's title. Philadelphia may be regarded as a name for the exile from family and from Ballybeg which Gar has long felt. Travel to the United States will clearly be a physical demonstration of this condition, but it will not necessarily cure it, particularly since Gar's social status and job prospects will hardly be improved by his new life. He will still be attached to his family, in the person of his aunt Lizzy, who is as erratic and garrulous as Gar's father is predictable and taciturn. And instead of laboring in his father's store, he will be a clerk in a Philadelphia hotel. America, therefore, may prove to be a reprise rather than a revolution.

To Gar, Ballybeg has meant lovelessness, boredom, and the fecklessness of imperfectly realized ambitions. As his Ballybeg life presses in on him for the last time, its emptiness and stultification become evident. Gar's loutish friends, the unctiously banal cliches of the parish priest, the demoralized state of Gar's old schoolteacher, and above all Gar's nonrelationship with his father bespeak an emotional and cultural wasteland. The one bright spot for Gar has been Kate Doogan, with whom he was in love and (refreshingly, for an Irish play) in lust. But a combination of economic insecurity, diffidence in the presence of Kate's father, Senator Doogan, and her family's assumption that Kate will marry within her class—in other words, a coalition of personal impoverishment and social expectations—defeats Gar.

When to his surprise Kate comes to say goodbye, Gar ends her visit with a denial of friendship's tenderness and for his coup de grace uses the words of an earlier visitor, the dilapidated old schoolmaster, Boyle: "Impermanence—anonymity—that's what I'm looking for; a vast restless place that doesn't give a damn about the past." The sentiment is as little Gar's as the words are; indeed, Boyle himself doesn't believe them, as is borne out by the fact that his advice to "forget Ballybeg and Ireland" is followed immediately by "Perhaps you'll write me"—a re-quest for remembrance. In any case, Gar's problem is that he is unable to obliterate Ballybeg and the human experiences that typify it. He cannot find within himself an indifference to match its apparent indifference to him: instead he finds rage, disgust, and pain. Gar spends more time looking back than he does looking forward. Private Gar remarks: "You know what you're doing, don't you, laddybuck? Collecting memories and images and impressions that are going to make you bloody miserable; and in a way that's what you want, isn't it?"

The source of Gar's pain and rage is emotional, as his cruelly outspoken response to Kate's visit suggests. In fact, Kate seems to be the immediate reason for Gar's emigration. For, as the play's most substantial flashback reveals, it is on Kate's wedding day that his childless aunt Lizzy from Philadelphia comes visiting with her husband Con and friend Ben. Lizzy, made emotionally susceptible by the sight of childhood places, by the sight of her dead sister's only child, and by the awareness of her own childlessness, recruits Gar to fill her American life. Gar, made emotionally vulnerable by the wedding, makes a "silly and impetuous" acceptance of her offer; as he ruefully reflects, "She got you soft on account of the day it was."

Central as Kate is to the development of the situation, Gar's experience of her underscores emotional pain at a deeper level of his makeup. This level is occupied by his relationship with his father, a relationship that ushers in and closes out the action of the play. S. B., which to Gar stands for "Screwballs," is an undemonstrative, unappealing, unprepossessing figure, his mind fixed on practical matters and his emotions heavily under wraps. His self-possession and inexpressiveness stand in explicit and frustrating contrast to his son's insecurity and histrionics. Indeed, perhaps the playwright may have painted too un-ambiguous a portrait of S. B. for the audience to accept that he married Gar's mother, or to believe what the servant Madge says about him. Yet, quite unexpectedly, at the end of the play he does reveal, though not to Gar, that he too has memories of his son and feelings resulting from them. This twist in his character is a good example of Friel's use of a strategy of unpredictability in presenting his material. (Another example is that of Ned, the most loutish of Gar's peers, taking off his belt and giving it to Gar as a parting gift. And of course, Gar, split between public and private versions of himself, neither of which he can adequately control, is virtually a definition of unpredictability.) In addition, however, S. B.'s memory and the fact that it is accompanied both by emotion and by an incapacity to put that emotion to some use in his relationship with Gar show that he too is caught. He is able neither to deny the emotion nor to admit it. Gar is not his victim; he is his heir. He represents an intensification of his father's mentality rather than the antithesis of it.

Gar and his father possess a mutuality at a textual level that they decline to control or acknowledge at a personal level. The repressive character of their relationship is both a deficiency and a reality. Such a degree of interaction between levels shows how adeptly Friel allows his characters the subjective freedom of their temperaments through his firm control of the integrative, objectivizing requirements of the text. As ever, Friel's subject is human nature, its vagaries and imperfections. What he has succeeded in addressing in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, however, is not the regrettable existence of flaws and deficiencies but the expressive potential they contain.

This thematic adjustment is given its most complete expression in the character of Gar. The fact of his being divided reemphasizes the paradoxically enabling nature of incompleteness, which is further underlined by the strict injunctions in the play's introductory material:

The two Gars, Public Gar and Private Gar, are two views of the one man. Public Gar is the Gar that people see, talk to, talk about. Private Gar is the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id.

Private Gar, the spirit, is invisible to everybody, always. Nobody except Public Gar hears him talk. But even Public Gar, although he talks to Private Gar occasionally, never sees him and never looks at him [emphasis in the original]. One cannot look at one's alter ego.

Private Gar is the one who has no place in Ballybeg: he is the Gar who is in exile. He also is the witty, outrageous, satirical, sensitive, fantasizing, distancing Gar. He is the essentially theatrical Gar, who acts out what his public brother has no audience for. He is the Gar who utters what Ballybeg unthinkingly, unfeelingly, unconsciously perhaps, consigns to silence. He is the Gar who compels Public Gar "in whispered shout" to say, "Screwballs, say some-thing! Say something, father!", though at the time both Gars are alone and desolate after Kate Doogan's farewell visit.

Private Gar, therefore, is by far the abler and freer of the two, yet he is also the one whose independent existence can be upheld only by a willing suspension of disbelief. He is Gar's potential, rather than Gar's reality. He is also what the culture of Ballybeg has no room for. The division of Gar, thus, is an imaginative measure intended as a critique of local and familial narrowness and repetitious, mundance routine. The two Gars, taken jointly, comprise a picture of wholeness that their environment will not allow. Or, since it is impossible to take the two Gars as one, the environment constitutes a reality that Private Gar cannot alter. The obvious element of contrivance in Friel's strategy is what the revelation of a flawed reality crucially depends upon.

Distance, then, in various conceptions of the term, is at the center of Philadelphia, Here I Come! It is given geographical, cultural, and social expression in the play's title, psychological expression in the two Gars, and emotional expression in Public Gar's two stunted relationships (with Kate and his father). The play's ultimate and most telling expression of distance, however, is silence. When words fail Gar, emotional disenfranchisement is the inevitable result. His experiences with Kate's father and with S. B. say as much. Yet, as Private Gar's verbosity indicates, it is only through words that some degree of integration may be possible between Public Gar and his needs. And it is the silence of others, notably S. B., that fuels Private Gar's verbosity. The play cannot help but criticize the distance that it shows silence enjoining. Thus, Philadelphia, Here I Come! validates its own medium—a medium that requires that certain indispensable statements be made. In doing so, it validates the presence of its most theatrical, most artificial, and most artful character, Private Gar. For these reasons, in addition to those that show the play to be the fruitful outcome of Friel's theatrical apprenticeship, Philadelphia, Here I Come! may be instructively regarded not only as, in its own right, one of the author's most memorable works, but as a play that … embodies in clear and original form many of his career's artistic and cultural preoccupations. Here is the first decisive formation of that matrix of themes—conflict between public and private selves, solitariness, lovelessness, family tensions, cultural aspiration and cultural impoverishment—that has continued to nourish Friel's dramatic imagination. As for Philadelphia itself, it is difficult not to conclude that, in the words of Robert Hogan, "in sum, this is a brilliant and beautiful study of isolation and its inevitably accompanying anguish. Well played, it should leave its audience both charmed and bruised" [After the Irish Renaissance, 1967]. Critical responses of the play have generously endorsed these terms of appreciation.