When writing his 1997 play Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Brian Friel made an “exciting discovery”: Harpocrates, the God of Silence. For a writer who had been so much at pains to show on stage the inability of words to communicate the innermost feelings, this infant god was readily embraced as the perfect symbol with which to begin and end, as in the Ancient Rome, this transcendent performance. By placing the character of Bridget, an inarticulate autistic girl, at the beginning and at the ending of Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Friel counterbalances the “sound and the fury” that pervades modern life as reflected in the three couples of the play, while, at the same time, this reminds the audience of the sacred nature of drama, a ritual which puts the spectators in contact with the mysterious. However, this play is also important because of its autobiographical hue: we find the playwright fighting with his ghosts in front of the audience, splitting his persona into two characters, Tom and Garret, who develop on stage his fears and preoccupations at the time, including his recent meditations on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the inexpressible. Give Me Your Answer, Do! is Friel’s last original play written in the 20th century, the closure of a very personal cycle in which the author unveils himself using his own vital experiences as a direct source of inspiration.When writing his 1997 play Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Brian Friel made an “exciting discovery”: Harpocrates, the God of Silence. For a writer who had been so much at pains to show on stage the inability of words to communicate the innermost feelings, this infant god was readily embraced as the perfect symbol with which to begin and end, as in the Ancient Rome, this transcendent performance. By placing the character of Bridget, an inarticulate autistic girl, at the beginning and at the ending of Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Friel counterbalances the “sound and the fury” that pervades modern life as reflected in the three couples of the play, while, at the same time, this reminds the audience of the sacred nature of drama, a ritual which puts the spectators in contact with the mysterious. However, this play is also important because of its autobiographical hue: we find the playwright fighting with his ghosts in front of the audience, splitting his persona into two characters, Tom and Garret, who develop on stage his fears and preoccupations at the time, including his recent meditations on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the inexpressible. Give Me Your Answer, Do! is Friel’s last original play written in the 20th century, the closure of a very personal cycle in which the author unveils himself using his own vital experiences as a direct source of inspiration.