[Philadelphia, Here I Come! premiered at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in 1964. It opened 16 February 1966 at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York City. In the following review of the New York production, Kauffmann asserts that Friel's play "is like his hero: amiable and appealing enough but unexciting."]

"This is a great country for export," a man said to me once in Galway, "and what we export is young men." That is the theme of Brian Friel's play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! which opened last night at the Helen Hayes: the familiar tale of youth setting out in the world, and in this case an Irish youth leaving a tiny village that has grown tinier.

Young Gar O'Donnell is off to Philadelphia in the morning (as still another song has it), away from his father's brown house behind his father's dull shop, away from the girl he didn't marry, away from the lads with whom he lied about the trollops whom they never touched. In fact, Gar is leaving the lovely fiction of his youth for the beginning of some reality, and the trouble with Mr. Friel's play is that this fiction, for all the good feeling beneath it, has come off a well-rubbed shelf.

The agony of youthful frustration is familiar, and even the Irish version (through Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien and a flock of lovely others) is familiar by now, too. What Mr. Friel has to offer is not new insight but novelty—and not so novel at that: the idea of having his hero played by two actors. There is a public Gar, whom everyone sees, and a private Gar, seen only by the other one—a source of dialogues when alone, and of impudent comment when public Gar is in company.

Through this not-quite-novel novelty of view, we see the last night at home before Gar's departure. There are scenes of reminiscence: when he lacked the gumption to speak up for his girl, when his "American" aunt and uncle visited their old village and asked him to come live with them in Philly and be their filial love—with air-conditioning and a promise of a job.

There are scenes of the ritual and rote in the O'Donnell household: the tea, the schoolteacher's visit on the way to the pub, the canon's nightly call for supper and checkers, the affectionate nagging of the old housekeeper (played with gnarled love by Mairin D. O'Sullivan). The texture of Gar's repetitious life is well woven. We know all the reasons why he wants to break out of this webby humdrum, all the fragments and snips of American jive and TV and film that have formed a transparent mosaic across his vision and all the reasons deeper than reason that at last tug at him when he must go.

And all this Mr. Friel has made recognizable and believable. But all this is also a little flat. His play, as a dramatic event, moves along mostly in one plane of intensity and progress, and as a lyric of poignancy, it lacks edge. Only toward the end, there is one scene like a micro-photograph of the familiar, scrutinizing so closely that the familiar becomes new. At two o'clock on that last morning, when the widowed father and his son cannot sleep and meet in the parlor, they try to reach across the long-frozen feelings between them, casting back and forth a thin filament of memory.

It snaps. They never embrace or exchange a really affectionate word. The awareness of that schism, unbridgeable, between the two, who see it, hate it, yet cannot even speak of it, is Mr. Friel's sharpest barb of the evening.

That scene is well played by Eamon Kelly, the dour, lantern-jawed father, and by both embodiments of his son, Patrick Bedford, the public one, and Donai Donnelly, the other. (Mr. Donnelly will be remembered as the appealing Irish lodger in the film of The Knack.) In the rest of the play Mr. Kelly has little to do except paint the surface of his character, and the two Gars have to spend all their talent—of which they have plenty—on keeping their private one-man vaudeville duo bright.

Hilton Edwards's direction is workmanlike, but it is a disappointment after the brilliant work of his that has been seen here. Lloyd Burlingame's setting is, as it should be, depressingly decent.

At the last, despite the good work of most of the actors and the better work of some, it is Mr. Friel who lets us down. Not by trickery or fakery but simply by naiveté in art. There is considerable pleasantness, little poetry and insufficient power in his play. His Ballybeg household is drawn honestly enough, but it comes trailing a long line of novels and plays that deal with the same material: with Billy-Liar youths dreaming fantasies in drab bedrooms, mocking the clichés around them and finally feeling the ties that underlie even dislike.

Forty or 50 years earlier we might all, figuratively speaking, have been bowled over by Mr. Friel's candor and his theatrical devices. He has his own countrymen to blame, as well as a lot of other authors, if we now think his play is like his hero: amiable and appealing enough but unexciting.