Cast member Michael Daly as Teddy, Frank Hardy’s manager and van driver. Courtesy Schoolhouse Theatre
By DAVID POGUE
From the description, you might not expect “Faith Healer” to work as a play. There’s no action, no dialogue, and no set to speak of. Three actors appear, but only one is ever onstage at a time. They take turns delivering four monologues, each about 30 minutes long.
That radical structure killed “Faith Healer” when it debuted on Broadway in 1979, written by Irish playwright Brian Friel (best known to Broadway audiences for his Tony-winning 1990 play “Dancing at Lughnasa”). Audiences were baffled by the show’s unfamiliar structure and fragmented storytelling. (“It isn’t an easy evening,” noted The New York Times at the time, “The playgoer must contribute his close attention.”)
But in the 45 years since its debut, “Faith Healer” has been frequently produced, and has even landed on two “best plays of all time” lists. A 2006 Broadway revival starring Ralph Fiennes collected four Tony awards.
The latest production is closer to home. It’s a production of The Schoolhouse Theater in North Salem, one of only two remaining professional theaters left in Westchester, where it’s running through Sunday, Dec. 22.
“Professional,” in this context, means that it employs Actors’ Equity union performers. Don’t be fooled by the community-center building, the $50 ticket price, or the 99-seat black box theater. If your field of view were constrained to the actors before you, you’d have little chance of knowing that you hadn’t paid $200 for a Broadway ticket.
That’s because the three actors are uniformly exceptional. Each manages not only the prodigious feat of memorizing the play’s 15-page monologues — and delivering them, mercifully, in consistent accents — but also to make Friel’s storytelling feel spontaneous instead of written. They convince us that they’re speaking unrehearsed.
Victor Slezak (of “The Bridges of Madison County” and about a thousand TV shows, including “Succession”) plays Frank Hardy, a self-doubting, self-medicating, Irish faith healer in the 1950s who may or may not have actual healing powers. He addresses the audience directly — in the past tense — as he describes how his touring “performances” worked.
“Precisely what power did I possess? Could I summon it? When and how?” he asks. “Nine times out of 10, nothing at all happened. But they persisted right to the end, those nagging, tormenting, maddening questions that rotted my life.”
The second monologue belongs to Grace, who identifies herself as his wife. She’s played by Elisabeth S. Rodgers, a veteran of regional theater, Off-Broadway, and lots of Shakespeare. Hers is a story of toxic love — a relationship she should leave, but can’t, with tragic results.
Finally, there’s Frank’s long-suffering manager and van driver, Teddy — “poor old stupid, generous, loyal, unreliable Teddy,” as Grace describes him — played with comic cockney perfection by regional-theater veteran Michael Daly. His monologue, in which Teddy describes some of the other acts he’s represented (a woman who talks to pigeons, a dog that’s been trained to play “Plaisir d’amour” on bagpipes) offers the play’s only comedic moments. They come precisely when we need them most — before things start getting really dark.
Schoolhouse artistic director, Owen Thompson, has directed this play/nonplay with a subtle and realistic touch. In the director’s notes, he writes mostly about the topic of faith healing, but that isn’t really what the play is about.
What really gets the after-show dessert conversations flowing is the three characters’ different tellings of the same events. Is Grace the faith healer’s mistress, as he describes her — or his wife? When their only child died in birth on the road, did Teddy build a makeshift cross and say some prayers? Or was that Frank?
Frank gives us a detailed description of the day his mother died. Then why does Grace remember it as his father dying?
Do they just remember things differently? Or are these characters deliberately lying, adjusting the story to beef up their own importance in the narrative? (They are, after all, speaking directly to the audience throughout.) Or is it some of each?
No matter what you decide, the unreliable narration matters. The variations shed different kinds of light onto the person doing the telling. It’s a twisty, layered, ingenious way to create characters.
“Faith Healer” is intense, convincing, and tragic, more so in North Salem, where the performers are 15 feet away from you. There’s no amplification to add artifice to the effect, no goofy little microphone tabs sticking out of hairlines. It’s pure emotion, as close as a heat lamp.
That said, the play’s structure is radical, and the storytelling is fractured, told out of sequence and without spoon-feeding. You’ll appreciate the play even more if you read the original script. (You can “check out” an electronic copy at the great online public library, at archive.org.) Only then will you see how subtly but clearly playwright Friel sets up some of the devastating story points that confused some of my fellow audience members.
Put another way, it isn’t an easy evening. The play-goer must contribute his close attention.
The Schoolhouse Theater is located at 3 Owens Road, Croton Fall. For tickets and more information, visit theschoolhousetheater.org.