Wonderful Tennessee.

As I write this, there is a very good production of Dancing at Lughnasa playing at the Philadelphia Drama Guild/Annenberg Center; later in the season, Arden, another Philadelphia company, will be doing Translations (1980). Philadelphia is not an anomaly. Brian Friel - new works and old - has become a staple of regional theaters all over the country. Yet his most recent play, Wonderful Tennessee, in a predictably excellent Abbey Theatre production, lasted only a few days on Broadway. It will presumably find new productions somewhere beyond the street of broken dreams.

Like Aristocrats (1979), Wonderful Tennessee is another Friel play in which a group of people gather for an occasion - a death, a celebration - and quietly, unwillingly let their lives unravel before our eyes. In Tennessee, three couples have come to a decaying pier in Donegal (not far from the fictional Ballybeg, the usual setting of Friel plays) to catch a boat to an island only occasionally visible offshore. The outing was Terry's idea, to celebrate his birthday, but they are stranded on the pier since the aged boatman, who lives just offstage, never comes to get them. As they pass the time - talking and singing, fueling and damping down the tensions among them - we learn that Terry's sister, who seems so relentlessly dense, is not so much forgetful as blessed by a selective memory that allows her to misremember her part in her dying husband's having turned away from the career in classical music that was his youthful ambition. His voice nearly destroyed by the disease that is killing him, he does most of his talking with his accordion. Terry's sister-in-law, a reluctant teacher of classics, is given to raucous songs to mask her disappointment in her husband, who is writing a book about time that he will never finish, and her uneasiness over an affair with Terry. Terry's own marriage, to a lawyer who is in and out of institutions, is even less stable than the others. The vulgarian among these quasi-intellectuals, Terry, a pop-music promoter and gambler, has been sustaining them financially. Now he is broke - temporarily, he insists - but long enough for him to lose the option he has taken on the island, which he remembers having visited years ago.

The title comes from a song that they all sing, "Down by the Canebrake," in which Tennessee is the unattainable destination of the song's narrative voice. The island - once a place of Christian pilgrimage - is their Tennessee, a promise of peace and beauty, a surcease from loss. Remembered hymns aside, they seem largely secular, but they perform a ritual before heading back to their everyday lives. One of them removes a ruined life preserver from the frame that holds it, which is then revealed as a cross, and to it they attach bits of their belongingsbits of themselves - and after circling a pile of rocks, they leave, promising to return. A band of recognizable Friel losers who cling to the possibility that their Tennessee is still out there on the horizon, still reachable.