Touch and Go

By T.E.Kalem

THE FAITH HEALER

by Brian Friel

This play is literate, wise, perceptive, humane and wryly humorous, but as drama it needs a blood transfusion. Structure may be the chief culprit. Irish Play wright Brian Friel has divided the play into four Rashomon-style monologues. The first and last are spoken by Frank (James Mason), the faith healer, the second by Grace (Clarissa Kaye), his wife, and the third by Teddy (Donal Donnelly), Frank's promotional warmup man.

Confined to the past tense and a prickly brogue, the trio conjure up a existence of bucketing around Scotland, Wales and Ireland in a van that doubles as home and transport. They fetch up in drafty halls before the blind, the crippled and the mad (unseen), some of whom never wanted to be cured but came to confirm their unyielding despair.

Frank's healing touch is not bogus but erratic. When his "performance," as he calls it, works, he and the healed are joined in a mystic ecstasy of wholeness.

At its core the play is not about the characters' lives or Frank's strange powers.

Friel uses faith healing as a resonant metaphor of the artist and his gift, the mystery of how the muse inspires, deserts and sometimes destroys its own. Friel leaves the subject as murky as he found it, but his actors are luminous. Returning to Broadway after 32 years, Mason is a necromancer at his craft. His real-life wife, Clarissa Kaye, seems like a Mother Courage on loan, and Donnelly is a mischievous imp dressed in the motley philosophy of show biz. Faith healers, all.

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