Faith Healer

Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times

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, under the bold, deeply insightful direction of Mikhael Tara Garver, the three performers in UMA Productions’ breathtakingly good revival of the play -- Chris Hainsworth (as Frank Hardy, who plays the title character), Danica Ivancevic (as Frank’s wife, Grace), and James Joseph (as Frank’s manager, Teddy) -- easily compete with that famous lineup. Obviously there could be no greater compliment.

True, the UMA actors may be a bit younger than Friel intended. But in many ways this injects the work with an added poignancy. For what we hear in the four soliloquies that comprise this Rashomon-like drama in which the same story unspools from a series of subtly different perspectives, is a tale of passion turned bitter, and faith ground down to despair.

And these younger actors make the inevitable downward slide all the more moving. In addition, designer Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set (expertly lit by Jesse Klug), makes us the most intimate participant in Friel’s drama. The stucco-clad, wood-beamed room Bembridge has carved out of a deliberately cramped basement space in the Chopin Theatre turns the audience into the participants in Frank Hardy’s "one-night-only" stands of faith healing. It also wonderfully suggests the tattered van and threadbare bed-sits that often became home for these three travelers, and the endless cold, damp rural pubs and church halls where the faith healer plied his trade to the luckless inhabitants of tiny, isolated villages throughout Britain.

Of course all theater -- whether in the form of a con artist serving up false hope, or a "legitimate" actor speaking a grand text -- requires an act of faith on both sides of the stage if healing is to occur. And that may just be Friel’s little inside joke here, even if his story, at moments blackly comic, is the stuff of tragedy. The emotional dynamics among Frank, Grace and Teddy -- who have pinned their dreams and disappointments on each other for 20 years -- are gorgeously limned by Friel.

And each of these people tries to be something of a faith healer (successful or not) for the others. Frank is the Irishman with "the gift" -- part true believer, part dazzling charlatan, and forever awash in a sea of self-doubt, self-loathing, lies and alcohol as he barely ekes out a living. He has married far above his station and this only heightens his sense of failure. In public, he calls Grace his "mistress" rather than his "wife" just to hurt her. But Grace, who adores and nurtures him, never wavers. Beautiful, proper and smart (she gave up a career as a lawyer -- and her family’s sense of honor --to run away with Frank), she tries to bear him a child and fails, only adding to their despair. As for Teddy, the high-spirited Cockney "business manager" and ne’er-do-well who loves them both, he puts all his faith in the dream that Frank will make it big one day. He probably should have stuck with his dog and pigeon acts, which he describes in hilarious terms as he muses on the mysterious nature of ambition, talent and success.

Hainsworth -- with his luminous face, dark hair and beard, and a rich, confident voice that gains our trust -- has an undeniable charm as Frank, the man who goes one step too far when he makes his "Irish homecoming." (You can only fool some of the people some of the time.) Ivancevic, riveting in her strong but gaunt beauty and clarity, has shone in supporting roles for years, but now finally gets a chance to rule the stage. And rule she does in her searing portrayal of a woman whose heart knows no limits. As for Joseph, he is "fantastic" -- a perfectly fleet English music hall clown, and the ideal mascot who deals in his own form of faith healing. Friel, now 78, and the author of such plays as "Dancing at Lughnasa" and "Translations," often is referred to as "the Chekhov of Ireland." But you also might think of him as Ireland’s version of August Wilson, for his characters’ greatest currency is their language. They speak and the world comes alive"