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Cracking the code by measuring the skull: Friel's 'The Home Place' examines 19th-century homeland security.

Article Excerpt
From the beginning of his career, Irish playwright Brian Friel has resolutely insisted on the capacity of his family's native County Donegal--rural, harsh, gorgeous, and for centuries impoverished by colonization--to be as suitable a setting for grand-scale narratives as any world capital. While his subject matter may be Irish, from the late 16th-century massacres that are the backdrop for "Making History" to the mid 20th-century economic stagnation in which "Philadelphia, Here I Come" takes place, Mr. Friel's storytelling consistently has global implications and applications. It is theater that's always scrutinizing the minute particulars of power relationships, whether between conquerors and colonized, or parent and child, or two lovers.

Even when he's dealing with war or imperialism, Mr. Friel never sets up his staged universe as a simplistic clash of civilizations: In their day-to-day existence, Mr. Friel's people flirt--culturally, romantically--across the lines that divide them. Even the characters who turn out to be military or intellectual thugs get caught taking pleasure in the place names...