SOURCE: "The Public Face and the Private Self," in The New York Herald Tribune, 6 March 1966, p. 17.

[In the following favorable review of Philadelphia, Here I Come! Kerr observes that the risky device of having two actors portray Gar is surprisingly successful.]

Brian Friel's very moving play, Philadelphia, Here I Come, seems utterly incapable of making a mistake, which is all the more interesting because it risks so many. It takes its biggest risk right off. Young Gareth O'Donnell—not quite young any longer, but not truly feeling himself a man, either—is putting his few things together in the small town of Bally beg, Ireland, before flying off to Philadelphia, where he will work in a hotel and occupy the spare bedroom in the apartment of his Irish-American fright of an aunt. He is leaving behind him a father who hasn't said an unexpected word in 20 years, a girl who has married some one else, and a pubful of cronies who were once fun to be with but are now fast fading into "ignorant bloody louts."

Gar, as he is called by every one who knows him and knows him so little, can no longer really speak to the world of his childhood or of his buoyant near-coming-ofage: each passing year has robbed him a little of the use of his tongue, and when he puts out a hand to touch a presence or a memory it cannot reach the whole way. Everything is as it always was, only it has grown silent and closeted, frost-bitten by all the days that have drifted by in the diminishing hush of habit. Not to have opened one's heart of a Sunday means to have lost a part of it by Monday, and there are now so many Mondays multiplied that the very calendar of feeling has turned brown on the wall. Weeks do not matter much in solitary confinement; and the weeks are swiftly folding into forever.

The leap to America does not promise much. There is more talk in America, but Gar has heard some of it, and it is the talk that fends meaning off, talk so noisy with affection that it fears its own pauses; pauses tend to call a man's bluff. Determined to make himself cheerful between an actual old silence and a threatened new one, Gar goes into his bedroom—where the mold-green wallpaper and the lithograph of the Sacred Heart have matted themselves together like the bottom newspapers in an attic—singing out his destination to the tune of "California, Here I Come."

In the bedroom alone he is not so alone as he was. Every other line of the song is taken by a voice that seems to belong to the wallpaper and the battered suitcase and the mirror before which Gar ties his tie. It is a voice that shares the room, unobtrusively, with Gar, and in a moment or so it acquires a body. The second Gar that slips from the closet with a chiding tongue and a wicked eye for emotional detail is called, on the program, the "private" Gar, and yes, author Friel is going to double our vision, giving us two central figures in occult counter-point—sometimes gesturing in unison, sometimes giving one another the lie—all evening long. While the "public" Gar is making a painfully ragged botch of his last meeting with a girl he once loved, while he is testing his father in hopes of rekindling an ancient kindness or doing his best to believe his buddies as they promise themselves a wild night with the town wenches, his ever so animated shadow is going to be on hand to demand the truth of things, to prod and tease and mock and pry until we have the whole of Gar's head in our heads, until the auditorium is filled with its mocking, brutal, funny and heart-breaking rattle.

The device works superbly, on the instant and to the end. Why does it? After all, Eugene O'Neill made a failure of his try at it, and in the nature of things it is perilously close to a trick. Well, there are several too obvious and too easy answers to the question. One is that director Hilton Edwards has managed the visual and vocal dance of joined identities with such scampering adroitness and elusive grace that we never have a moment to wrench the two halves apart. And he has indeed done that. It is astonishing how naturally we accept two deliberately unlike faces as indispensable partners in a single psyche. We don't look from one to the other, seeking contrasts. We see both at the same time, making fools of one another, suffering one another not at all, but irrevocably one; to have either figure vanish, even for a very short time, is to cleave the stage. Of course only the "private" Gar can vanish; when he does, we feel as strangled as the "public" Gar does and want him back.

The second easy answer is that actor Donald Donnelly is so insidiously commanding as the secret self that we would scarcely dare doubt him for fear of interrupting our own sad and malicious delight. Mr. Donnelly has gone beyond the twelve-tone scale into some unfathomable mathematics of style, so that he can at one moment sneer home-truths while a rosary is being recited and at another linger over language with great longing: a phrase like "and left the girls dangling their feet in the water" seems to catch the broken mirror of moonlight as music might.

But there has to be a still better answer to explain the play's power of openly affecting audiences—by openly I mean to unrestrained tears—while keeping its sassiness intact and its central trick busy. The answer, I think, is that the play needs its trick if it is ever going to tell its truth. The conceit of the double person is something absolutely demanded by the material, not something ingeniously added to it. The play is about man's failure to speak what he feels; but we could not have the play at all—not naturalistically, and not in prose—if we did not have one dumb ox who fails to speak and one dancing devil who feels. The core of the play is rent by contradiction; it must have twins to plead its case.

On top of that, the doubleness is true. Every last one of us—"Have pity on every god damn man jack of us!" is the cry phrased in the play—literally talks to himself, upbraids himself, insults himself, every hour of the day. Playwright Friel has a sure instinct for the trivial self-accusations that cause us our deepest agonies. One thing for which Gar cannot forgive himself is as silly as it is painful: in an excess of romantic confidence he has blabbed to his girl about the "egg money," the small change he picks up on the side from farm to farm that his father knows nothing about. The secret is not very humiliating; Gar is humiliated because it was a secret he meant to keep and he cannot curse himself roundly enough for having exposed the crazy workings of his mind. We all have covenants with ourselves we betray; and when we turn sick with the signs of our weakness, it is the "private" in ourselves, stupid but unrelenting, that makes us ill.

We all have ears we didn't ask for, ears that hear the awfulness in the speech of those we love. Gar "public" wants to like his aunt and uncle from America, if only for selfish reasons; Gar "private" cannot help hearing the aunt say that, upon their arrival in another country, a friend "treated us like we was his own skin and bones." The garbled phrase is an ugliness, funny but repellent; it is only picked up by the recording ear, the invisible radar, that will never pretend to have noticed it. Gar likes his old schoolmaster, drunk that he is, and perhaps is grateful to be given a volume of the decaying fellow's poems, "privately printed," as a going-away remembrance. All the same, one part of him listens to the schoolmaster's coy, self-protective, falsely candid remark that of the poems "some are mawkish" and hears each disingenuous inflection for precisely what it is. Two men stand at attention for one man at all times—in life as on the stage, separately alert. The play has found the one right and easy means of saying so.

Mr. Friel, together with his excellent company of actors, has cross-lighted the stage, subtly sending one shaft down where it will intersect with its opposite, blending fact and feeling at a center-point where both can burn together. The play's two-handed reach catches hold of almost everything in a constricted, but so very complicated, world: the way an appalling aunt proclaims her resemblance to a beloved but unremembered mother, the way an unsalted codfish of a father recalls a suit the boy once wore, the way a curt crone of a housekeeper bribes a lad's friends to be friendly, the way a tongue that wants to be kind races ahead of itself in its hurry to hurt, the way a clod quickly colors with embarrassment when he is at last impelled to be generous. Philadelphia, Here I Come can conventionally be called bittersweet, but it is not so romantically rueful as that. It is plainspoken in order to prod out hidden poetry; it is funny to be fair-minded, cruel to be kind. It simultaneously imprisons and liberates its hero, letting him suffer his failure to speak and letting him speak his savage heart out, as though to say "It is necessarily so." Life is a halfway house in which a man meets and stumbles over himself. As with any stumble, there is hilarity in the clodhopper's clumsiness and in his fall a real hurt. Both are on the stage of the Helen Hayes.

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