Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
Mundy
Ballybeg. Literally “Smalltown” in Irish, Ballybeg is the village just outside of which lies the Mundy household. Brian Friel has made Ballybeg a symbolic Irish “everytown” in several of his plays, often using it, as he does here, as a microcosm for Irish society at various points in the country’s history. As Michael says in his opening monologue, these few weeks in August, 1936, produced in him an unease, a sense of things rapidly changing. Ballybeg, then, marks the threshold between childhood innocence and adult experience for Michael. Similarly, it marks the line between two eras of modern Irish life, as the family dissolves after the sisters lose their respective livelihoods to factory mass production or to the dwindling number of students at the village school.
*Donegal. County in western Ireland; remote even by rural standards, it is one of the last places to benefit from the electrification of the country and part of the Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking region. It is known for its rough beauty, with wilderness or backwater associations, hence the lingering customs of Lughnasa, the harvest festival honoring the pagan deity Lugh. These agrarian rituals at the village’s margins are set against the approaching changes to small village life, just as the Mundy sisters’ first wireless radio represents the encroachment of the wider world upon their lives in the mid-1930’s.