This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in 1936. The narrator, the illegitimate son of one of the sisters, fondly remembers the five women who raised him, specifically the summer, during the pagan festival of Lughnasa. That year, his elderly uncle returns after serving for 25 years as a missionary priest in a Ugandan leper colony. The sisters also acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And he meets his father, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever.
Widely regarded as Brian Friel's masterpiece, this haunting and evocative memory play is Friel’s tribute to the spirit and valor of the past.