Give Me Your Answer, Do! by Brian Friel

Ah, Friel is so good at making his audiences uncomfortable.  This play follows a respected but not terribly successful Irish author Tom and his alcoholic wife Daisy, parents to a disturbed, institutionalized young woman.  They have an uncomfortable dinner party with a commercially successful author and his wife, Daisy’s parents, and an academic interested in buying Tom’s papers for a university.  Discomfort ensues, of course. 

I don’t know if the play works quite as well for folks who haven’t spent all that much time studying contemporary Irish literature.  I do know that we writers can’t help but write about writers–we’re not terribly good at remembering that most people don’t actually find writers all that interesting, sadly, and that none of us is actually at the center of the universe.  Sigh.  But, if you like Dancing at Lughnasa or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf then it’s certainly worth a gander.  Remember, plays are quite short, and make for great metro reading.  Also, I want to be able to talk to more of my friends about Irish drama.  Because I, like all of my kind, think the rest of you just need to realize how fun this Irish stuff is already.

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