'Translations,' Speaking to Universal Themes

For a play about language barriers, the Keegan Theatre's "Translations" communicates with admirable clarity and assurance.

This staging of Brian Friel's 1980 drama boasts robust, aptly idiosyncratic performances -- from a portrait of an impractical British lieutenant to one of a classics-crazed peasant who seems to have attended a finishing school for hobos. Steering these and other interpretations with a sure hand and a keen instinct for pacing, director Mark A. Rhea keeps the story's foreground and background distinct, while gracefully navigating the ups and downs of mood.

This artistic discipline is nicely balanced by George Lucas's cluttered-hay-shed set, littered with bales of straw, milking stools, jugs, a yoke and other barnyard paraphernalia, with room for a door that frames a vista of misty hills. Also strewn about the space (which is lit in ruddy and grain-colored tones by lighting designer Dan Martin) are battered books, in crates and in haphazard stacks on the floor.

For it is in this ramshackle building, in 1833, that the play's alcoholic Irish schoolmaster, Hugh (Kevin Adams), runs a school for the folk of Baile Beag, an Irish-speaking town. When a company of British army officers arrives, on a mission to map and rename all of Ireland, using tidy Anglicized nomenclature, the upshot is personal conflict, linguistic crisis and a clash of civilizations.

The Keegan production paints an absorbing portrait of the Baile Beag community, peopling it with amiable eccentrics and compelling salt-of-the-earth types -- such as the village scamp, Doalty, whom actor Matthew Keenan depicts with glinting eyes and an endearingly weaselly air; or the quietly anxious, overworked farm woman Maire (Susan Marie Rhea).

Dressed in patched and fraying tramp's clothes (Kelly Peacock designed the mostly rustic costumes) and sporting a grizzled beard, Stan Shulman does a virtuoso turn as Jimmy Jack, a bleary Latin- and Greek-speaking oddball who is more at home in Virgil's "Georgics" than in the real world. Colin Smith is a shade halting as Manus, Hugh's kind, scholarly son, but Adams is more convincing as the father -- the irascible, tragic ruin of a brilliant man, swigging surreptitiously from flasks and banging his walking stick imperiously on the schoolroom's beams in bids for attention.

The scenes featuring these and other Irish speakers display the close-knit vitality of Baile Beag, without degenerating into circuslike bustle. Some of the production's most stirring portions, though, are the small-scale ones in which tension segues to lightheartedness and back. When Maire and the romantic British officer Lt. Yolland (an affecting Peter Finnegan) fall in love -- although neither knows a word of the other's language -- their interactions ping-pong artfully from shy smiles and nervous laughter to agonized awkwardness.

In another intimate sequence that muses eloquently on cultural gaps and the yearning to transcend them, Yolland dreamily murmurs Irish place names, staring out at the hills, while his translator colleague, Owen (Jon Townson) -- who happens to be Hugh's son -- sprawls happily on the floor with a map. Just minutes later, the duo are trading querulous remarks -- and then exploding in companionable guffaws about a mangled Irish moniker.

The ebb and flow of such scenes, and the strong characterizations throughout, make the production suspenseful and engrossing -- but Friel's ruminations on identity, cultural struggle and the politicization of language come through clearly, too. Rhea staged a well-received "Translations" for Keegan in 1997; the decision to return to the piece has been a smart one.

Translations, by Brian Friel. Directed by Mark A. Rhea; sound, Tony Angelini. With Samantha Sheahan, Erin Buchanan, Daniel Lyons. Through May 17 at the Church Street Theater, 1742 Church St. NW. Call 703-892-0202, Ext. 2, or e-mail boxoffice@keegantheatre.com.