Uma Productions
Highly Recommended - Chicago Sun Times 01/15/07
Highly Recommended "Faith Healer," Irish playwright Brian Friel’s tour de force tale about the turbulent, shapeshifting nature of love, loss and belief, received a Broadway revival last year featuring the starry trio of Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid. Great actors, all. But now, in Chicago,
01/09/07 - 02/10/07
Thu-Sat 730p; Sun 3p
"While its efforts can be hit-or-miss, Uma Productions has yet to stage a show that does not point to the intriguing talent of artistic director Mikhael Tara Garver. Make no mistake, this is a director looking to change the way audiences think about their surroundings. For the company’s current production of "Faith Healer," by Brian Friel, Garver has once again paired up with scenic designer Brian Sidney Bembridge, a skilled and canny artist who invariably does his best work with Uma. "Faith Healer" is no exception. It is one of the company’s strongest productions to date, with a trio of performances that will stay with you long after the show is over. But first, the atmosphere. Audiences enter the Chopin Theatre’s basement studio from a back alley. (After securing your tickets in the main lobby, an escort will take you down.) It is an unexpected surprise; you think, for a moment, you have discovered a new part of the building. In fact, Bembridge has constructed a small, narrow, self-contained room that sits in the middle of the basement’s traditional open performing area — creating, essentially, a box within a box, with white stucco walls and exposed wooden beams. It feels as though you’ve entered a rural town hall or a church basement, and it is an evocative scene-setter for Friel’s 1979 play about an itinerant Irish faith healer — The Fantastic Francis Hardy, "the man on the tatty banner" — his beleaguered wife and their promoter/road manager. Told through a series of monologues (the characters never interact), we learn of their shady, shabby tours through Scotland and Wales, where "we were always balanced somewhere between the absurd and the momentous," says Frank (nee Francis) between gulps of whiskey. Part sham, part shaman, Frank (Chris Hainsworth, with an intense, seedy charm) offers up his own version of events, when he and his traveling companions returned to Ireland for a fateful night at the pub — when the drinks and jokes gave way to something ominous and violent. His story matches neither that of his complex and desperate wife, Grace (a wonderful Danica Ivancevic, who’s dullish wardrobe can not mask her beauty), nor that of his plucky manager, Teddy (played expertly by James William Joseph), who provides the play with its comic relief, and its profound sense of despondency. More than a gimmick, the Rashomon setup hits home in unexpected ways. Frank is a man who believes his own lies, a more universal trait than most of us want to admit. "Spend your life in showbiz," Teddy observes, "and you become a philosopher." He might have been talking about the play itself. Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune 1/18/07
"Mikhael Tara Garver skillfully directs an intimate, entertaining evening for Uma Productions, made all the more intense by Brian Sidney Bembridge’s claustrophobia-inducing set. Chris Hainsworth as the con man is best at bluster, Danica Ivancevic is openly emotional as his mistress, and James William Joseph is hilarious and heartfelt as the manager" Jenn Goddu, Chicago Reader, 01/18/07
"Within the Chopin’s basement, there’s a fully enclosed room, like a tiny meeting hall, with a low ceiling, wooden chairs and, at one end, a small stage. Director Garver could hardly get us nearer to the Irish faith healer, Francis (Hainsworth); his lover Grace (Ivancevic); and his English manager, Teddy (Joseph). Yet that forced intimacy never gets us any closer. The monologue drama suffers from the monologue dilemma: how much easier, it seems, to deal with one character at a time; how much harder, really, to make a lone character dramatically viable. Friel’s 1979 play gives the hard-drinking, self-questioning faith healer some nice turns of phrase; people want from him not hope, Francis says, but confirmation of their hopelessness. But a monochrome Hainsworth can’t lend color to Francis’s lackluster narrative. While Grace at least has dramatic conflict (irrational love), and while Ivancevic invests her with vigor and verve, her emotional extremes seem mechanically explained (stillbirth, Francis’s neglect) rather than organically developed. That is, Friel has things to say (about faith, memory, art) but doesn’t credibly say them through his dutifully offered backstories; the idea and story remain detached. And despite Joseph’s flashy cockney showman, so do actor and character—a gap that this gifted director, in past productions, has so efficiently closed. arver cocoons her actors and audiences within the world of a play. Friel’s world would’ve been more inhabitable if he’d made his point that art (and love) is a transformative experience of shared faith by creating such an experience" Novid Parsi, TimeOut Chicago, 01/18/07
Author
Brian Friel
Director
Mikhael Tara Garver
Performers
Chris Hainsworth, Danica Ivancevic and James Joseph
Production
artistic associate Brian Sidney Bembridge (sets), artistic associate Scotty Iseri (sound), Jesse Klug (lights), artistic associate Alison Siple (costumes), Lara Musard (props)
Tags: Theater, Old Europe, 2007