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Stage Review: 'Faith Healer' offers four takes on one tale
Friday, March 31, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Monologues are tough. With no one for the actors to play against, some shows can leave you feeling like they're reading a story to you instead of showing you one. The words are there, but the mounds of information communicated between the lines -- lingering stares, breaking of eye contact, nervous fingers, quick retorts and all that those actions imply -- are lost without the human interaction.
Even when someone tells you a story, more information is transferred through the nuances of personal contact than through the simple presentation of facts. It takes a great script, written with authentic personality, and great actors subtle enough to interact with a static audience to give a monologue the same momentum as a good play with characters that interact.
Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre pulls it off with "Faith Healer." Under the direction of artistic director Andrew S. Paul, the four monologues fill the Hamburg stage with rich, mossy atmosphere and the residue of lost personal contact.
Brian Friel's 14th published work is more than an exercise in storytelling. It's the same story told four times about an Irish faith healer, his Yorkshire mistress and Cockney manager who for 20 years traveled the back roads of Great Britain collecting the shillings of the sick, poor, disabled and dying.
"Fantastic" Francis Hardy is no more a fraud than he is a prophet. Even before the social hall doors were opened at most of his "performances" Hardy sensed that no miracle would occur. But sometimes, no one explains how or why, the broken people leave there whole, as does Hardy.
The shared story offers three disparate perspectives on their tours and relationships, culminating in a devastating incident at a remote Irish town. Bingo O'Malley as Hardy tells the story twice. He's riveting, playing it as distant from the audience as his character was to the people closest to him, before moving close -- really close both physically and emotionally -- to intimate some point he sees as truth.
To pass time Hardy recites the names of all the dying Welsh villages they visited on their travels. It's a haunting chant, slow but determined, melancholy and disturbing, that becomes an important literary device. On its second telling, Hardy's version of the story suggests answers to the questions that propel the play.
If Hardy lived to perform his life's work, his mistress lived for Hardy. Kate Young, a singer with the Dear Friends music ensemble, shows her unshakable commitment in a fiery, sometimes bitter monologue. She tells her side of the story with loads of attitude and an emphasis on their emotionally crippling rows and her warped memories of his awkward affections.
Roger Jerome is a British actor who has worked with everyone from John Gielgud to Patrick Stewart. A connoisseur of the classics, he brings a sense of dignity to the faith healer's manager and puts the recollections of the quarreling couple in stark perspective. As his character tells the tale, in slippers and a satin evening robe, he greases the words with a dozen ales. With great subtlety, Jerome's storytelling spins in wilder and wilder arcs until he breaks down in a moment of touching realism.
With no characters to interact, Paul calls on lighting director Andrew David Ostrowski to accent the mood changes dictated by Friel and the cast. Soft lights radiate against a giant rear-stage poster of O'Malley as Hardy to bring the troubled faith healer to the stage even when his character isn't really there. They are subtle moments in a typically subtle Irish play, ones that shouldn't be missed.
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Where: Lester Hamburg Studio, next to City Theatre, Bingham and 13th streets, South Side.