Liminality in Brian Friel’s Wonderful Tennessee

After the worldwide success of the 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel (Omagh, 1929), a playwright known for his search for new ways of dealing with his old preoccupations, created what many critics understood as a sequel to that play.Wonderful Tennessee, which premiered in 1993 at the Abbey Theatre, has been frequently considered Lughnasa’s younger and plainer sister. Whereas the seductiveness of the former cannot be denied, I intend to defend in this article the importance in Friel’s oeuvre of Wonderful Tennessee, a play rich in meaning and original in form that presents a complete rite of passage as described in Victor Turner’s anthropological studies. Friel unites elements that form part of ancient, Celtic and Christian rituals to show what has forever been humanity’s aim: the attainment of the absolute