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Faith Healer
History of a Theater, as Precursor to Reality TV
BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
RECOMMENDED
“We were always balanced between the absurd and the momentous.”
—Francis Hardy in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer
Last summer, in an introduction to her mock campaign-performance Kristina Wong for Public Office, solo performer Kristina Wong explained that the reality TV ethos in politics had rendered theater in general, and performance in particular, irrelevant. The traditional theater arts, performed in traditional ways, simply couldn’t compete with the carnival of political events, she suggested. For this reason, she was running for public office, and turning her campaign into a performance — the only way left that “performance” could generate any excitement.
Perhaps offering some comfort to those gobsmacked by the tectonic cultural changes of the 21st century (assaults on scientific facts; deliriously repeated conflations, deceptions and lies in the name of truth; the hollow rhetoric of political inspiration; capricious character assassination in the service of partisan divides), Brian Friel’s Faith Healer demonstrates how the reality TV ethos was already bubbling beneath the surface of pop culture, before the term social media had been invented, even before TV itself gained its foothold on international markets. By reality TV ethos, I’m referring to depictions of reality forged from events sensationalized into fictions, through the prism of 19th century carnie shows.
(The late Irish dramatist’s seminal 1979 work opened on Saturday in an imperfect, enchanting revival at the Odyssey Theatre.)
Faith Healer is the story of a theater, perhaps even the theater, via the picaresque adventures of a carnie show headlined by an itinerant Irish faith healer — i.e. a solo performer — named Francis (Frank) Hardy (Paul Norwood). The narrative is told through a sequence of four monologues: by Frank; by his wife, Grace (Diana Cignoni); by Frank’s Cockney manager, Teddy (Ron Bottitta); and finally, a return engagement by Frank, tying up some threads of the saga, though key details are recalled by different characters in entirely different ways. More on that later.
Paul Norwood as Frank. (Photo by Enci Box)
The perpetually impoverished trio, bonded by a devotion that borders on the perverse, is on the road traversing Wales and Scotland. Frank’s purpose, like that of Jesus, is to visit small towns and villages, and to heal those afflicted with sundry maladies by the laying on of hands.
Grace comes from a family of lawyers and judges, a world of rationality from which she fled to join this “mountebank,” this mystic, this artist. Years later, she’s now as despondent as she is dependent on him. Their shouting matches are epic, sadistic.
“Where’s the Genius? I came to see the great Irish genius! Where is he?” Teddy recounts one of Grace’s rants, as Frank is preparing for an audience that hasn’t yet shown up, and may not.
“Get out. Get that bitch out!”
“Oh, he’s here, is he?” she says. “‘Physician heal thyself!’ she says with this great, mad mocking voice.”
Diana Cignoni’s Grace (Photo by Enci Box)
Teddy introduces Frank with a showman’s flair (while a tinny recording of Jerome Kern’s The Way You Look Tonight plays on a gramophone player).
Frank is perhaps too introspective for his own good. He ruminates to us on how his audiences (maxing out at about 10 people, in damp, rented halls) hate him, because by their very appearance before him, they have made public their desperation. Furthermore, he opines, they have come to him not to be cured but, on some level, to have their ailments confirmed as incurable, and for that, they hate him even more.
He is an artist, a shaman, paralyzed by the fear of being a con-man, and he tries to work himself into the kind of pre-show actor-like trance that leads to the miracle of healing. Nine out of ten times, he says, “nothing happened.” And, sorry, but if that isn’t the story of LA theater, I don’t know what is. We sit in an audience, year after year, part of an activity on the margins of culture, often a mere cluster of bodies, receiving fictions, awaiting miracles, something to cure us of our spiritual woes. Nine out of ten times, nothing happens.
Oh, but when it does, yes, it’s the kind of miracle that keeps us coming back, that lingers for decades, regardless of how our memory of the event may evolve.
On one occasion, in a Welsh village, Frank cured all ten attendees in the hall. A bona fide miracle. One farmer made a speech: “Mr. Hardy, as long as men live in Glamorgenshire, you’ll be remembered here.” Teddy recalls how Frank and Grace danced, giddy, in circles after the audience had left. The local newspaper reported on the event, unable to adjudicate it scientifically but admitting that something remarkable had happened.
A review. A chronicle. Everything that theaters beg for, from any paper-of-record. Now a tattered clipping. Frank kept it for years as a form of what he calls “validation,” later admitting, years after it was written, that it was mere detritus, pointless, that it proved nothing.
Faith Healer follows the Irish trope of exile and homecoming. It is, at its core, a study in one man crucified by a talent that betrays him so often. He has the intuition to stay out of his native Ireland, until one day, he returns home. And this is the play’s culminating story, on which its ultimate view relies.
This is not Rashomon revisited, where the truth of a fact is perceived relatively from the point-of-view of the storyteller. This is something more chimeral, where — as studies have shown, a memory is determined not as much by an event as by the most recent recollection of the event, which is how memories evolve.
For example, something happened in the North of Scotland town, Kinlochbervie. According to Frank, he had to leave in order to attend the death of his mother. According to Grace, it was his father who died. According to Teddy, Frank never left; rather, with abject cruelty, he abandoned Grace while she was giving birth to his child in a van awaiting repair of a broken front axle.
Though the script makes no mention of when the play transpires, there is a reference to the marriage of two characters the same year that Kern’s The Way You Look Tonight was a hit (1936), which would land the play somewhere in the mid-to-late 1940s. To accept that fact, you have to believe the narrative, as told by one of the three characters, which Friel deliberately makes a dubious proposition.
Even my somewhat feeble attempt to fathom an empirical foundation to a fiction is precisely what the play is about: how we forge meaning and purpose from precariously remembered stories.
When such stories illuminate us, we call it art, or myth, which we then attach to our realities as a source of comprehension and, perhaps, of hope. When the stories degrade us, we call it trying to endure life in the 21stcentury.
Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun,
Now may I wither into the truth. —W. B. Yeats
Ron Sossi has staged a largely, yes, faithful production on the 30th anniversary of its first mounting at the Odyssey Theatre.
The formalism of Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s lovely set is suggested in the play’s text: A wooden platform stage (on the stage) that faces a clutter of mismatching folding chairs one would find in a Celtic village hall — a theater in a theater, all at a right angle to the audience facing it.
Rose Malone’s subtle lighting propels the often interrupted and diverging stories, from the bright blasts of an imagined public performance to the shadowed contours of private introspection. Denise Blasor’s period costumes have just the right seedy formality
Paul Norwood as Frank gives a loving, cautious, studied performance that begs the question of whether such a man could raise the tension of a pending miracle to fever pitch, in the manner described by Grace and Teddy. I wasn’t particularly convinced of that.
Sossi changed Grace’s birthplace from the North of England to Germany, probably because the performer, Diana Cignoni, is of German/Italian descent, and her Teutonic intonations are native. Her performance is utterly endearing, a woman facing down her tortured years on the road with twinkles of wit, crashing like Ophelia into madness, with a wavering pipe-like voice and a mop of perpetually damp hair.
Yet the production’s ultimate salvation is Ron Bottitta’s Teddy. With a perfect Cockney dialect, he sashays and quips and tells jokes (the stupidity of one of his clients — an artistic genius three-year-old whippet named Rob Boy, who mesmerized crowds by playing “Come into the Garden, Maude” on the bagpipes) with an easy charisma. He’s like an uncle from London’s east end.
Ron Bottitta as Teddy
Faith Healer was the play and the production that launched the Odyssey’s Sepulveda Boulevard complex in 1989. (It was then directed by Jack Rowe, and featured John Horn in the title role, along with Judy Geeson and Neil Hunt.)
I reviewed that production enthusiastically for the LA Weekly. There is something eerie about returning three decades later to the same theater to see the same play, as if nothing had happened in the intervening decades. As though 30 years had passed in the blink of an eye. A few of my colleagues now writing for Stage Raw had not even been born then. Others were mere infants and young children.
This raises, shall we say, certain existential questions that are personal, but also concern the larger profession of theater in Los Angeles, of how it has devolved and evolved. But that’s another story. If that story were also told by any number of my peers, it’s certain that, like the saga of Faith Healer, some of the details would conform to a singular narrative, while many others would diverge across the nooks and crannies of memory.
FAITH HEALER | By Brian Friel | Directed by Ron Sossi | Odyssey Theatre, 2055 Sepulveda Boulevard, West LA | Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; Wed., April 10 and May 8, 8 p.m.; Thursday April 18, 8 p.m.; $10 tickets available at 6 p.m. for perf on March 29, April 10 & 25; College Night April 26, $10 for students with ID, $10 for teachers April 5 | Through May 12. | (310) 477-2055. https://odysseytheatre.com. Running time, 2 hours and 10 minutes with intermission
