Aristocrats

The Irish Rep continues its 35th-anniversary celebration of the great playwright Brian Friel with a revival of his lyrical and Chekhovian 1979 drama, which pries up the floorboards of a dry-rotting clan in the rural town of Ballybeg. A grand and crumbling mansion runs on fumes of its former glory; the patriarch lies upstairs, demented and dying, while his children gather in the garden below, and catch up on their various desperate measures. Charlotte Moore, who directed the company's 2009 production of this play, take another crack at it now.