Max "Bunny" Sparber

I'LL TELL YOU a little something about theater criticism: It's a bit hard being the one to tell somebody whether a show is worth seeing or not, which has traditionally been the role of the critic, and it's a role I find especially uninteresting. Should you see a show? Does it look interesting to you? If yes, go see it. Hell, go see it if it doesn't look interesting. Go see theater. There's your answer.

We're often called on to provide an inventory of the qualities of a play, as though theater required a report card, and it is our job to grade its various elements. How was the costuming? How was the lead actor? The supporting actors? And I'll tell you the truth, I can't stand thinking about theater that way. If ever there was an art form desgined for the staging of complex and contradictory ideas, and for the creation of a limnal space in which the world is complicated and problematized, it is theater, and focusing on the physical details of a play can be enormously distracting from discussing the substance of a play. That's not to say you must never discuss physical details -- after all, if the actor doesn't know his or her lines, and the stage is accidentally set on fire, and somebody absent-mindedly forgets their costume and performs naked, its worth mentioning.

But, were I to do a proper report card of the Guthrie's production of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, I wouldn't know precisely what to say. It is Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling's acting debut in America, playing Francis Hardy, the titular characer. Dowling can act, and gives Hardy a sort of rugged intelligence. Hardy is supposed to be a bit of a drunk, and that doesn't really come across in Dowling's performance, except in his hair -- Dowling wears a badly cut wig that seems on the verge of simply drooping down across his face; his wig seems like it might have seen a bit of skid row. But can I criticize Dowling for not playing Hardy as a bit of a wretch? No, I cannot, because Faith Healer is about how people change the way they present themselves, and their memories, to suit their needs. It's not Frank Hardy that Dowling is playing, but Hardy as he wants people to see him. The play is a series of four monolgoues, and we don't find out about Hardy's drinking from his mouth. Instead, we find about it from two other characters, and much of what they say doesn't square with what Hardy tells us; their monologues don't even square with each other.

The production, which Dowling also directed, is slow and meditative and mournful, and Dowling benefits from two terrific actors tackling the other monolgues: Guthrie regulars Sally Wingert and Raye Birk, playing Hardy's wife and manager, respectively. Wingert's monologue is troubled: she was barely acknowleged by Hardy, who wouldn't even call her his wife or admit she was from Ireland, and her relationship with him was one of conflict -- and part of that conflict is that she knows she'd be better off without him, but can't stand leaving him, and despises herself for it. Birk, in the meanwhile, offers what seems initially to be a comical monologue about their travels on the road, but gradually reveals a subtle tragedy: Hardy and his wife were the center of his life, but he barely registered in theirs.

There are only a few stories told in this play, and they are, for the most part, told by all three characters: A lost child, a miracularous healing, and a climactic violent encounter in an Irish pub. But none of trhe characters tell these stories the same way, and essential details are different from story to story, and Dowling's direction highlights these inconsistencies, or, at least, doesn't get in their way. And the truth will not be known -- Friel isn't building a mystery, but, instead, meditating on the way history is up for grabs, and is the providence of the teller. (Critic Fintan O'Toole, discussing the play at the Guthrie on Monday night, pointed out that in Friel's world, and in much of Irish theater, it isn't just the future that is unknowable and ever-shifting, but the past is like that as well.) What's even trickier is that Friel doesn't let on that he thinks there is one truth, and we're just hearing versions of that, which leaves his characters either liars or interpeters. I suspect Friel thinks they are a bit of both. Dowling's direction doesn't lean one way or the other, which I think was the right decision.

Friel borrows a bit from Irish mythology in the telling of this tale, the story of Naoise and Deirdre, star-crossed lovers who fled to Scotland to avoid being killed, and then were brought back under a false promise of safety. I think it helps to know this play's link to mythology, because, if you read mythology, and, especially Irish mythology, you enter a world in which there are often two or three or sometimes many more versions of a single tale; in this one, for instance, a character either kills herself or dies of a broken heart. Rather than simply tell one version of the story, folklorists have chosen to tell them all, explaining that there are multiple versions. Friel's play has that quality as well, but expands on it, exploring the reasons why people might choose to tell one version of a story over another. So, in Faith Healer, the character Grace is Frank's wife or his mistress, depending on which storyteller tells the story, and she's Irish or English, depending on who is telling the story. Properly, though, she's Anglo-Irish -- she a descendant of the Protestant Acendancy, and part of a privileged (and historically complicated) class in Ireland. Irish theater has examined the frequently troubled relationship between Irish Catholics and Anglo-Irish; Friel himself has tackled it in The Home Place, which the Guthrie mounted a few years ago. But Friel is not addressing it here, or rather, Hardy is not addressing it. There have been a lot of plays about marriages between Irish Cathlics and the Anglo-Irish, and, for Hardy, this is not one of them. He prefers the version of the story in which Grace is English, and his lover.

Dowling has directed this play before, and his previous production, from 1994, was decribed by a New York Times critic as "Incadencent," and he gushed about it being one of the transformative theatrical experiences of his life. I didn't find this production to be that, but, then, I just saw it on Saturday. Sometimes, a play will work on you slowly, and, years later, you'll realize how important it was. A Broadway version of Faith Healer did especially badly, and Fintan O'Toole hypothesized that this was because it was a play that had to create its own place in the world; he points out that it has been far more influential than its few productions and general lack of cricitcal accolades would suggest. But the Guthrie is the right place for it, for two reasons. Firstly, because Brian Friel was, in a way, responsible for Joe Dowling. There is a story of Dowling seeing Friel's Philadelphia, Here I come! at the Abbey Theatre when he was 16, and becoming so obsessed with it that he saw the play night after night. 15 years later, Dowling was the artistic director of the theater, and Dowling has returned to directing Friel over and over again over the course of his career.

But, also, Friel is a product of The Guthrie. Fintan O'Toole spoke of Friel's early work, which was as a short story writer, and explained that there was a crisis of faith that Friel experienced in which he rejected the form and turned to playwrighting, in which he could stage his uncertainties about storytelling. But Friel's early efforts were unsuccessful, until he spent several months in Minneapolis in 1963 at the invitation of Tyrone Guthrie, and watched Guthrie preparing the first season of Guthrie's new theater. It was there that Friel began to formulate Philadelphia, Here I come! ("I went home on a Guthrie high and wrote the play," he said), and the play launched Friel into international success.

At least, that's one version of the story; the version that Friel tells. Interestingly, even though Tony Guthrie himself decalred Friel "a born playwright" upon reading Philadelphia, the Guthrie didn't produce a Friel play until 1996, when Dowling did a version of Philadelphia, 33 years after it was written. Prior to that, you'll find scant, if any, mention of Friel's experiences at the Guthrie in any of the Guthrie literature. It seems somehow appropriate that, for years, there were two version of the opening season of the Guthrie: the first, Brian Friel's, includes Brian Friel; the second, the Guthrie's, generally neglected to mention him. But those stories have dovetailed now; Friel's story is now emphasized in the history of the theater. The past is up for grabs, and the telling of it depends on what benefits the teller; in this instance, thanks to Dowling, the Guthrie has realized the value of telling Friel's tales.

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