The playwright Brian Friel has always been skeptical of capabilities of language to convey truth. As a citizen of post-Gaelic Ireland, his suspicion both political and philosophical: he finds himself in ironic position of writing about native culture in language of Ireland's colonizer. His plays, especially Translations (1980) and its companion piece The Communication Cord (1982), serf-consciously dissect political and epistemological implications of this imperialist's language. While Friel simply has no choice but to write in English if he to reach a broad audience, he does so ironically and in order to point out enforced nature of his choice. His dialogue in isolation, then, cannot be understood as transparent medium of his meaning. To an extent, of course, this true of all playwrights, whose works must be seen as scripts susceptible to a range of choices by directors, actors, designers, and audiences. As David Hare wrote, the play in air. Yet more often than not, critics of Friel have come closer to Richard Pine's dismissal of stagecraft as contrivance than to a rich understanding of many ways a theater piece makes meaning (Ireland's 138).(1) Richard Tillinghast's 1991 New Criterion article a rare exception to this tendency. He places other critics' focus on language within theatrical tradition: From The School for Scandal by Sheridan . . . to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, we remember great plays for their dialogue rather than for inventiveness of their dramatic structure. Talk, quips Tillinghast, is national (35).(2) Tillinghast reminds us that often for stage Irishman, to speak to act, a pastime as engrossing as fishing or pub crawling. For him, Friel goes beyond his predecessors by firmly grounding his dialogue in theatrical experience. Indeed, Friel often called the father of contemporary drama, allowing such recent talents as Frank McGuinness, Marina Carr, and Tom Murphy to flourish in often hostile genre of theater (Pine, Irish Drama 190).(3) These factors make two of Friel's plays especially worth study. Both Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994) are monologic. Their status as theater pieces demands that we respect them as performance, but their form encourages us to treat them as prose poems. Their lack of conventional stage action is, however, through a sort of logical hairpin curve, exactly what makes them so dramatic. By replacing action with narration, Friel not only critiques penchant for oratory, but he also dramatizes his contention that events are meaningful mainly insofar as they become stories, fictions told by their participants. Their meaning resides not in what actually happens but in how they are narrated by and to people who participated in them. This not, after all, so very far from way that naming becomes exercise of naked power in Translations. The difference in that play between Gaelic Baile Baeg and English Ballybeg important precisely because it transcends mere language. The eventual dominance of Ballybeg represents political dominance of English. It a meaningful sign simply because it sign of powerful. (And in Translations, these words will be made into literal signs: road signs.) Because naming an action, as meaningful and full of conflict as conventional stage action, theater space and human voices of actors are both indispensable to Friel. Their voices embody, in all these plays, power struggles over reality, in a way that escapes critics looking only at words on page. Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney are united both by their monologic form and by their contention that truth subjective, a matter of perception and recall. Sight becomes a metaphor in both Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney for knowledge. Yet easy equation of sight and insight troubled by unreliability of perception and memory. …