PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME!

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME!

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME!

I've stuck around this hole far too long. I'm telling you, it's a bloody quagmire, a backwater, a dead-end! And everybody in it goes crazy sooner or later! Everybody!
-Gar Public, Episode 2

Irish dramatist BRIAN FRIEL'S Philadelphia, Here I Come! premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964, where it was directed by Hilton Edwards, co-founder of Dublin's famous Gate Theatre. It transferred the following year to the Helen Hayes Theatre in New York, where it was an instant hit-and it also achieved much success in its first London production in 1967.

The play is set is set in Ballybeg, a small town in the north of IRELAND, on the night before Gar O'Donnell, a twenty-five-year-old man, is due to immigrate to America. In the course of the...