Irish playwright Brian Friel, famed for 'Lughnasa,' dies

DUBLIN (AP) - Brian Friel distrusted the reliability of mere facts. Ireland's greatest playwright of his generation, who died Oct. 2 at the age of 86, spent much of his life trying to convey the deeper truths of our existence - of a world filled with compelling fictions constructed by people, families and whole nations. Friel's fictional County Donegal universe of Ballybeg - whose name, in Ireland's native tongue of Gaelic, means "little town" - provided the setting for most of his two dozen plays over five decades in which he sought to explore what he once called "the dark and private places of individual souls." In each work, he created worlds of meaning set in distinctive eras: of the...