Faith Healer

Four mesmerizing monologues by three characters -- faith healer Frank Hardy, his wife Grace, and his manager Teddy -- constitute Brian Friel's Faith Healer, the celebrated Irish playwright's exploration, in the style of "Rashomon," of the trio's shared lives. One person's truth is seldom the same as another's, it's clear, as the self-billed "Fantastic Francis Hardy, Faith Healer" spins his tale of his itinerant "ministry without responsibility," his marriage, his drunken escapades in wanderings around Ireland and Scotland with Grace and Teddy, and his fear and pride in his "gift." Grace (Megan Burnett) and Teddy (Scott Dowd) have their say next, letting us see events related by Frank (Clinton Gill) in quite a different light. The play comes full circle when Frank returns at the end with a cataclysmic monologue.

All three actors powerfully evoke the time, place, and incidents they've experienced. On a nearly-bare stage they tell of Frank's "performances," as he calls them, his view of the "crippled, blind, deaf, and disfigured" people who seek his healing ("they really wanted confirmation of their incurability"), the occasional miracles that would happen and cause Frank to panic, the birth and burial of the couple's stillborn child, the horrendous episode that allowed Frank to "renounce chance." Despite being denounced as a mountebank by Grace's unforgiving father, Frank felt he became whole in himself when his laying on of hands caused a cure. Still, he wondered if healing could be effective without faith. But faith in what? He silenced the nagging question with whiskey. To nervous, chain-smoking Grace, he was "a twisted man with a talent for hurting...his essence eluded me, and I was wary of it." Yet as she watched him move through crowds of desperate people she thought herself "lucky" to be married to him. Teddy, who recalls details of events more as Grace does than Frank does, believes that "great artists" such as Frank need only three things to succeed: "talent, ambition, and not two brains to run together." Beer-guzzling Teddy in his Cockney voice insists he never let work spill over into friendship with Frank and Grace. Some of his remarks about Grace's beauty and his concern for Frank belie that assertion. One wonders how he will survive the loss of them.