[In the essay below, Coakley relates Friel's dramatic methods to those of Anton Chekov in order to illuminate the structure and action of Philadelphia, Here I Come!]

Probably no recent Irish play of more than passing interest has been so largely ignored by critics as has Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! A success in Dublin and New York, it enjoyed inclusion in that annual, dreary volume which grants the title of "Best" to scripts some-times, though not always, "Good" or "Better" than most of the commercial theatre's products. But box office returns or fame in the marketplace do not necessarily guarantee recognition in the study, and the play's considerable virtues, both literary and dramatic, have gone unnoticed, perhaps overlooked in the ballyhoo surrounding "the longest running Irish play on Broadway."

Friel, of course, is no stranger to the theatre; once a teacher in the public schools of northern Ireland, he abandoned his academic career in 1960; since then he has written full time, publishing two books of short stories and eight plays, the latter produced in Ireland and America with varying success. He is a playwright, however, of note: further proof, if it be needed, that the English theatre is, essentially, an Irish creation. And he brings to the stage a remarkably sophisticated literary sensibility, a confident sense of what is theatrical, and a precise and exquisitely lyrical talent for the spoken word which are noteworthy. What I pro-pose to do in this brief essay is discuss Friel's play in what seems to me the most profitable and useful terms: those we have come to call Chekovian. To relate certain of Friel's dramatic methods to those of Chekov is to illuminate, I think, the structure and effects of a substantial new Irish drama which deserves to be better known.

Philadelphia, Here I Come! is a memory play set in the country of a young man's mind. To explore that difficult terrain it avoids "big moments"; its attitudes are ironic, its emotions understated, and its dialogue painfully, though not self-consciously, introspective. Its characters are not larger than life, and unlike so many vague, imprecise examples of dramatized memories, it refuses to sentimentalize its experience; uncovers a past not burdened with guilt, but merely tinged with regret; lingers over a difficult present devoid of meaning; and looks forward to a future neither bright nor promising. Devoid of Celtic mists and windy heroics, however, the play is remarkable for the skill with which it dramatizes a common experience in a most uncommon manner. Essentially retrospective in outlook, its subject matter concerns that most Chekovian of rituals: departure or leavetaking; and its plot is simple, familiar, even banal: a young man of 25, Gareth O'Donnell, is about to leave a frustrating and dull life in a rural Irish village for the adventure promised by a job in America, a position at a Philadelphia hotel arranged for by his Aunt Lizzy, the sister of his dead mother. And like the Moscow of Chekov's famous sisters, the Philadelphia of this play's protagonist is a supposed mecca, a glorious place where wishes come true and dreams are realized. It is then upon this characteristic principle of the incongruity between reality and delusion, this clash between things as they are and things as they are believed to be that the drama rests. Subtitled a comedy, the play's action is "on the night before, and the morning of, Gar's departure for Philadelphia," circumstances old-fashioned critics might call ripe, but which Friel regards as no more than the sources of uncertainty. What he dramatizes then are not only a young man's growing pains with their attendant loss of illusions (albeit a large part of the play's concerns), but, more importantly, of how fearful and difficult it is to speak our deepest feelings, particularly to those we love. Indeed, the integrity Of feelings (hence the poignant drama) Friel dis-covers in this most everyday of situations constitutes the play's most admirable theatrical virtue. It is in its very commonality of interests, its refusal to be original or significant that Friel's play recalls the methods of Chekov. Like him Friel balances familiar truths with the most complex of emotions and mixes banalities with the profoundest of sentiments, while he develops that most truly comic and Chekovian of attitudes: human understanding.

Following a typical Chekovian strategy, Friel sets out seeming to write a conventional play, a series of farewells in which half a dozen people arrive to say goodbye to young Gar, and then depart. Ostensibly, the action moves from event to event, a linked sequence filled with reminiscence. However, in lieu of a "plot," Friel substitutes a pattern, or string of incidents which operate only in context. Firmly threaded, however, to the forward line of movement (Gar's imminent journey to America), these incidents do not function in the action-counteraction motions of traditional drama, but move more vertically into the obstinate, ragged, often contradictory levels of experience. Eager to recapture the flux of personality, its myriad and evanescent nature, in short, to preserve the ephemeral, Friel practices a realism neither photographic nor repertoriai, nor fulsome, dull, or patronizing about its milieu or the inhabitants thereof. It is a realism no doubt better organized than life, an awareness that the slightest gesture or intonation can demonstrate the self; that there is a poetry discoverable in the kitchen, the pub, or a young man's room neither sentimental nor maudlin, but real and vital, possessed of a quiet unassuming theatricality which reveals but does not impose itself or its values upon an audience. It is realism not of representation, but one to the essence of life, an insistence that the dramatist has come not to judge, but merely to show, to make us see things as they really are. Organized upon artistic principles (what Coleridge called "organic" principles), Philadelphia, Here I Come! firmly and quietly insists, as does any Chekov play, that life is neither funny nor sad, but more often is both, simultaneously. Necessarily, its action is indirect, sometimes leaving the impression that it is all moods or reflections, when, in fact, it plunges deeply and tenaciously into its characters' lives in a way the linear play does not. Moreover, its rhythms are not simple, but complex, bound up in the dynamics of countless details which function contextually. This does not mean that the play is formless, a labyrinth of minuscle data and no more. On the contrary, each character who comes to say goodbye to Gar (his teacher, girlfriend, priest, or drinking pals, for example) does so in a scene bristling with subject matter. And these scenes are rituals of strict form, as each of the visitors contributes his share to an increasingly complex examination of Gar's feelings about his departure. Thus it is not the absence of plot, but its very density and richness which best describes the play's form. To be sure, its inci-dents are rife with details, but only those which precisely fulfill the demands of the situation in context. They are not the result of narrative or descriptive obligations, as they link, control, and integrate the mercurial associations of words, thoughts, and emotions of characters turning inward upon themselves. Within this organic form, what is done is not as important as how it is done so that, as in Chekov, method becomes a servant of manner, tone, or gesture; and action, at once indirect, oblique, and intricate concerns it-self not so much with events in the characters' lives as with the effects of those events upon them. Causality, the essence of linear drama, is not welcome in the uneasy, tenuous land of this play where nothing is fixed but the multiplicity of life within the teeming brevity of the vignette.

Such a verticular structure strongly affects characterization. And here the play most closely resembles Chekovian drama, for Friel develops his characters solely in context, sketches them with a minimum of information, gives them depth and dimension, but little, if any, direction. They are simple, ordinary people who must be played plainly and sincerely. Like the characters of, say, Uncle Vanya, they are absorbed in trivialities, immersed in minutiae, allowing the audience to learn only in passing of important changes in their lives. It is the theatre of small-talk, dove-tailed information, gossip, or hints which signal a perfervid subtextual life. Stern moralists, to be sure, would condemn these people as failures at life, but they have done the best they can; to do less is immoral. To discuss them is to note how Friel gently and dispassionately places them upon the stage, telling us little about them directly. Slowly, cautiously, we must infer who they are, were, or might have been. None dominates; all relate to the play's major concerns, as complicated actions unravel to disclose complicated relationships. Each is searching for the meaning of life, of love; yet each is tainted, flawed, betrayed not so much by emotional inertia as by present circumstances which, for one reason or another, have denied them some kind of fulfillment, some peace with themselves. Unable to reach out to those they love, they flee a situation rather than confront it. Still, one cannot make neat lists of these characters, nor moralize about their shortcomings, dividing them into recognizable types. Scrupulously, Friel balances and intermingles them; structurally, they interrelate, providing a sense of true ensemble. Of the three women (Madge Mulhern, the O'Donnell's housekeeper, Lizzy Burton, the aunt from America, and Katie Doogan, Gar's ex-fiancee), two are childless, turning to Gar for a son they could never have, nor ever will, while the young girl is doomed to an arranged, loveless, and socially acceptable marriage. The men fare no better. There is, for example, the dour, taciturn S. B. O'Donnell, a father who is no father to a son he can never reach; fixed forever, it seems, on memories of the untimely death of a wife he admits was too young for him; a priest who dispenses nothing but aphorisms; a schoolmaster who had loved Gar's mother, had been once a poet and is now a drunk; and, finally, Gar's friends, content to remain in the village drinking, carousing, avoiding responsibilities and maturity. What rescues these people from the realm of the portentous is their complete unselfconsciousness, their inability to be no more than what they are. Like their Chekovian counterparts they are hardly aware of what has passed them by. And Friel does not present them as downtrodden souls dwelling in perpetual gloom. On the contrary, as Chekov does, he mixes humor with pathos, blending irony and compassion with an equal lack of self pity, or sentimentality. These people, then, make do, endure, and Friel knows that their struggle requires a kind of courage heroes will never know. To each of them he gives, in exemplary Chekovian fashion, a moment when their inner life surfaces to tell us not some great truth, but their truth; it is a realization neither histrionic nor spectacular, but merely and deeply profound: an awareness of what life might have been and is not. But these discoveries (or morals, if you will) are within the situation and within the characters, not superimposed by the playwright. Hence the characters function as a Chekovian "chorus element" (to borrow Magarshack's phrase) i.e., they perform a choral function, of moral judgment upon the action. "Characters," Magarshack asserts, "assume the mantle of the chorus whenever their inner life bursts through the outer shell of their everyday appearance and overflows into a torrent of words." Like Chekov, then, Friel allows his characters to stumble upon themselves, and when this occurs they move from the world of realism into the world of art, giving the play an evocative stage poetry, enlarging its scope. They become, in short, symbols of us all.

Yet even as Friel builds his own version of the Chekovian play of indirect action, he introduces an important innovation of his own. In a shrewd coup de théâtre, he splits the character of the protagonist, using two actors to portray the public and privates selves of Gar. A convention as old as the medieval theatre, recalling the notion of the divided self, it is the pivotal conceit of the play, and its use has manifold implications. First, as an immediate source of tension or interplay between the two selves, the device obviously enhances the possibilities for character delineation of Gar, as intricate strands of experience buried with the private self are released and dramatized. Unseen and unheard by the other characters, often berating, cajoling, or goading his public counterpart, the private self is both omniscient narrator and confidant, a guide to the past, an alter ego who forces the other Gar to examine what he is about to leave. And if dramatically this use of a dual protagonist enlarges our knowledge of Gar, technically, it is a godsend. The private self performs double duty: supplying the audience with necessary information, or entrusting his public self with the "facts" needed to play a scene. For the private self distanced from the action, free to move in and out of scene at will, can, as if by poetic fiat, speak the unspeakable, express the unexpressable, do or say the forbidden. Expectedly, Friel seizes upon the comedy intrinsic in these privileges. To let the private self speak his "true" feelings is to give the audience information denied the other characters; it is to create discrepancy, promote irony, and the result is laughter. On the other hand, the use of a private self has a direct effect on the play's forward movement. Frequently he will halt the action of a scene to comment on its significance; or permit a character to leave a scene in progress to step forth and reveal heretofore unsuspected thoughts and feelings. What Friel has done, of course, is combine the dramatic liberty implicit in the convention of the dual protagonist with the old-fashioned Chekovian monologue, or tirade, put to new use. Here it encourages a cinematic expressivity to the play's action, a Joycean fluidity to the expression of the character's inner lives, while they move in and out of Gar's experience. Yet this mixture, at once loose and supple, pushes on to more complicated ends. Upon this flexible structure which bends but does not break, Friel imposes a double time scheme, utilizing flashbacks which shuttle from present to past to future. So fantasy, memory, and desire merge, as remarkably sophisticated techniques support an equally sophisticated dramatic form. Time and space linger, pause, and reflect upon the important moments in Gar's life which demand to be relived. And we have the clarity of true complexity.

But if Philadelphia, Here I Come! follows the practices of Chekovian dramaturgy, it is also touched with Chekovian grace, an atmosphere sui generis. It is a comedy, to be sure, neither black nor dark, but merely and acutely aware. It looks at, accepts, and understands human limitations, insisting, as does all comedy, that people do not change, learn nothing, but somehow go on. A play of many excellences, its techniques are noteworthy, its feelings honest, but it is, in sum and tone, a play of indecision, ambiguity, uncertainty, where loneliness is omnipresent, but never mentioned; where love is hidden, denied or non-existent. And it adds up to nothing but the doubts, fears, and confusions of a young man about to leave Ireland for America. Still, this very irresolution complements a dramatic action focused on the imprecision of memory, the aches linked with desires, and the humor implicit in dreams. Neither sociological, nor psychological, it is artistic, poetic, and moral, but all in a Chekovian sense. There is a nostalgia for a non-existent past, but, more pertinently, the individual's search for love and the meaning of life. And Friel's play walks a shaky middle ground which is so very real, so very human. In its quiet, modest way Philadelphia, Here I Come! is a paradigm for a large part of good drama today.