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Fathers and Sons
by Brian Friel
Directed by Stephen Hollis
November 22 to 24, 2003
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street, NYC
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| SYNOPSIS |
When Arkady graduates he returns home to his father's crumbling country estate with Bazarov, a fierce young revolutionary, and there follows a summer of debate and division as loyalties, confounded by love and duty, disturb and disorientate the once clear paths of change.
“Drama at its most stimulating and eloquent” NY Daily News |
| CAST/CREW |
Sam Gregory
Nikolai Kirsanov
Richard Ferrone
Prokofyich
Jamie Bennett
Arkady Kirsanov
Sean Arbuckle
Yevgeny Bazarov
Nora Chester
Princess Olga
Richard Ferrone
Timofeich
Jenny Noterman
Production Stage Manager
David Toser
Costume Consultant & Designer
Juliet Chia
Lighting Designer
Carol Rosegg
Production Photographer
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| PRESS |
Backstage
Although Brian Friel's skillful adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons" had a... [ read more]
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| DRAMATURGY |
Born on January 9th 1929, into a Catholic household in Omagh, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, Brian Friel is one of Ireland's most prominent playwrights. In addition to his published plays, he has written short stories, screenplays, film, TV and radio adaptations of his plays, and several pieces of non-fiction on the role of theatre and the artist.
Friel's father was a native of Derry and a primary school principal. His mother was from Donegal and Friel spent many holidays there. In 1939 the family moved from Omagh to Derry where Friel's father took a teaching position at the Long Tower school. Friel attended his father’s school and then went on to secondary school at Saint Columb's College, Derry. He began his university career at Saint Patrick's College, the Republic of Ireland's national seminary near Dublin, but instead of going on to the priesthood, he chose to take a post-graduate teaching course in Belfast. He started teaching in Derry in 1950 and wrote in the meantime. His first radio play A Sort of Freedom aired on BBC in 1958. In 1959 his first short story, "The Skelper," appeared in The New Yorker and his first stage play, The Francophile, was performed at the Group Theatre, Belfast. In 1960 he retired from teaching to write full-time.
Friel's early life had a strong influence on his writing. Though his father was a teacher, his grandparents were illiterate peasants from County Donegal whose first language was Irish. Thus his own family exemplifies the divisions between traditional and modern Ulster and Ireland, a recurring theme for Friel. Donegal features strongly in Friel's life and work. He relocated there in 1969 "partly to get into the countryside and partly to get into the Republic" and because he always felt that was where his roots lay. Many of his plays are set in Ballybeg, “a remote part of Donegal” and, as Seamus Deane notes, in “that borderland of Derry, Donegal and Tyrone in which a largely Catholic community leads a reduced existence under the pressure of political and economic oppression”. In 1980, Friel helped found the Field Day Theatre Company which is committed to the search for "a middle ground between the country's entrenched positions" and to help the Irish explore new identities for themselves.
Friel married Anne Morrison in 1954 and has four daughters and one son. Shy, elusive, yet playful and skeptical, he has made very few personal statements. In his "Self Portrait" he says, I am married, have five children, live in the country, smoke too much, fish a bit, read a lot, worry a lot, get involved in sporadic causes and invariably regret the involvement, and hope that between now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the end less frightening than it appears to me at this moment.
Brian Friel's plays have premiered and been produced at prestigious venues like the Abbey Theatre, London's West End and Broadway and have been highly successful everywhere. His first major play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! was the hit of the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival. In 1972 he was elected as a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. In 1981, Translations, one of his seminal pieces, was awarded the Ewart-Biggs Peace Prize. After co-founding Field Day, Friel continued his interest in the arts as a member of Aosdana, the national treasure of Irish artists, to which he was elected in 1982. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature by the National University of Ireland in 1983, and in 1987 was nominated to the Irish Senate. Dancing at Lughnasa, probably his most successful play so far, received three Tony Awards in 1992, including Best Play.
Novelist, poet, and playwright, Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) known for his detailed descriptions about everyday life in Russia in the 19th century. Turgenev realistically portrayed the peasantry and the rising intelligentsia in its attempt to move the country into a new age. Although Turgenev has been overshadowed by his contemporaries Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, he remains one of the major figures of the 19th-century Russian literature.
Ivan Turgenev was born in Oryol, in the Ukraine region of Russia, into a wealthy family. His childhood was lonely and traumatic. Turgenev studied first at St. Petersburg (1834-37). At the age of 19 he traveled to Germany to attend Berlin Universities (1838-41). He completed his master's exam in St. Petersburg. In 1841 Turgenev started his career at the Russian civil service. He worked for the Ministry of Interior for a short time. After the success of two of his story-poems, Turgenev devoted himself to literature and travel. He had a relationship with the opera singer Pauline Garcia Viardot, living near her or at times with her and her husband the rest of his life. Turgenev travelled to France with them in 1845-46 and 1847-50. Viardot remained Turgenev's great and unfulfilled love; in his youth he had had affairs with servant-girls, and produced an illegitimate daughter, who he named Paulinette.
During his studies in Berlin, Turgenev had became convinced of the need to Westernize Russia. Lacking the interest in religious issues like his two great compatriots, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he represented the social side of reform movement. Turgenev's solution was not revolution, mystical nationalism, or spiritual renewal but in the industriousness of the confident, methodical builders embodied by the engineer Vassily Fedotitch Solomin, a side character in his novel Virgin Soil. The 'positive hero' was a new type of personality who will liberate Russia from her backwardness.
It was the short-story cycle A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), that made his reputation. It is said that the work contributed to the Tsar Alexander II's decision to liberate the serfs.
Following the thoughts of the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky, who defended sociological realism in literature, Turgenev abandoned Romantic idealism for a more realistic style. During the period of 1853-62, Turgenev wrote some of his finest stories and novellas and the first four of his six novels: RUDIN (1856), DVORIANSKOE GNEDO (Home of the Gentry - 1859), NAKANUNE (On the Eve - 1860) and OTTSY I DETI (Fathers and Sons - 1862).
Hostile reaction to Fathers and Sons prompted Turgenev's decision to leave Russia for good. The novel examined the conflict between an older generation, reluctant to accept reforms, and an idealistic youth. In the central character, Bazarov, Turgenev drew a classical portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist - a word he invented.
"A nihilist is a man who does not bow to any authorities, who does not take any principle on trust, no matter with what respect that principle is surrounded."
(from Fathers and Sons, 1862)
Fathers and Sons is set during the six-year period of social ferment, from Russia's defeat in the Crimean War to the Emancipation of the Serfs. The central character is the young medical student and nihilist, Yevgeny Bazarov, who has been described as the 'first Bolshevik' in Russian literature. "I share no man's opinions; I have my own." Against the radicals of the new generation (the 'sons') Turgenev sets the older generation (the 'fathers'), who are represented in the novel by the landowner Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov and his brother Pavel.
After his self-imposed exhile, Turgenev lived first in Germany, then moved to London where Fathers and Sons had had great success. He settled finally in Paris where he lived with the Viardots from 1871 until his death. He became a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1860 and Doctor of Civil Law at the Oxford University (1879).
Turgenev's later works include novellas A King Lear of the Steppes (1870) and Spring Torrents, which rank with First Love (1860) as his finest achievements in the genre. His last published work was a collection of meditations and anecdotes, entitled Poems in Prose (1883).
Among Turgenev's close friend's in France was the writer Gustave Flaubert, with whom he had similar social and aesthetic ideals. They both rejected extremists - right and left - and stuck to a nonjudgmental if somewhat pessimistic depiction of the world. Struggling with his last, unfinished work, he wrote to Flaubert: “On certain days I feel crushed by this burden. It seems to me that I have no more marrow in my bones, and I carry on like an old post horse, worn out but courageous.” Turgenev died in Bougival, near Paris, on September 3, 1883. His remains were taken to Russia and buried in the Volkoff Cemetery, St.Petersburg.
MAJOR WORKS BY BRIAN FRIEL
1962 The Saucer of Larks: Stories of Ireland
1965 Philadelphia, Here I Come!
1966 The Gold in the Sea
1966 The Loves of Cass McGuire
1969 Lovers
1970 Crystal and Fox and The Mundy Scheme
1973 The Gentle Island
1974 Freedom of the City
1975 The Enemy Within
1978 Living Quarters
1979 Volunteers
1979 Selected Stories
1980 Aristocrats
1980 Faith Healer
1981 Translations
1981 Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
1981 American Welcome
1983 The Diviner: Best Stories of Brian Friel.
1983 The Communication Cord
1987 Fathers and Sons
1988 Making History
1990 Dancing at Lughnasa
1990 London Vertigo
1992 A Month in the Country
1993 Wonderful Tennessee
1994 Molly Sweeney
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