About the Play:

Aristocrats is a full-length drama by Brian Friel. Time has not been kind to the O'Donnells and their once high social standing has dwindled along with their finances. They return to their ancestral homestead in Donegal but events overtake them.

Aristocrats is a striking portrait of a family in decline. The O'Donnell family, once the aristocracy of their Irish village, are in reduced circumstances. Ballybeg Hall once played host to grand balls, musical evenings, tennis parties: its rooms busy, bursting with painters, poets and politicians. And presiding over all of it, the imposing figure of Judge O'Donnell. Now, on the eve of a wedding, the O'Donnell children have gathered at their crumbling family home to find that the rot has set in. As the patriarch lies dying in his upstairs bedroom, the grown up children sort out the truth about the family's past, present and future and the reality that the O'Donnell clan of Ballybeg has come to the end of its line.

Aristocrats premiered in 1979 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Then, after a successful British premiere in 1988 at Hampstead Theatre in London (where it received the prestigious Evening Standard Award for Best Play), it continued its award-winning ways in New York, where the US premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) in 1989 garnered the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. The show enjoyed numerous award-winning revivals and tours and has become a popular choice for regional, college, and community theatre productions. 

Cast: 3 female, 6 male

What people say:

"A lovely play, funny and harrowing. Mr. Friel makes the Irish condition synonymous with the human one." — The New York Times

"Poignant, moving." — New York Daily News

"Gently provocative and vastly entertaining." — New York Post

"Somber and elegiac but shrewd; touchingly funny and full of a brooding but hard edged melancholy." — Times (London)

About the Playwright:

Brian Friel (1929-2015) was an Irish dramatist, theatre director and author. One of Ireland's greatest playwrights, he was a leading voice on stages on both sides of the Atlantic. He received his college education in Derry, Maynooth and Belfast and taught at various schools in and around Derry from 1950 to 1960. Often described as the "Irish Chekhov," he has penned more than 30 plays in a career spanning six decades.