Faith Healer at The Schoolhouse Theater

Faith Healer at The Schoolhouse Theater

The characters in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer share everything about their worldly suffering that Samuel Beckett’s characters never get around to telling you. Not to belabor the analogy but if Francis Hardy embodies Estragon’s “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” from Waiting for Godot; and Grace Hardy all but speak’s Clov’s line from Endgame, “I can’t go, I’ll go on.;” then Teddy (Francis’s manager) personifies Winnie’s lasting refrain “…another happy day,” from Happy Days.

But where eternity is at the heart of everything Beckett writes, Friel’s characters reflect on one very corporeal existence. The brooding life that consumes all their lives, that of the itinerant Irish faith healer Francis Hardy. Searching for meaning in a bottle of booze. Is he a con man or an optimist, a psycho or a suffering artist? While Grace and Teddy wait for his salvation so they can have theirs. What elevates the soul gnashing look backs in Faith Healer above the eulogies at an Irish funeral, however, is Francis Hardy’s profession. Faith healer.

I gotta feeling, That tonight’s gonna be a good, good night

Hardy, you see, was a real man who worked the hills and dales of small town Scotland, Wales and Ireland sometimes succeeding but mostly failing to heal the sick, blind and crippled. It’s not easy being a faith healer who doesn’t heal 90 percent of the time. So, you drink, psychologically abuse your wife and ride in the back of the truck clutching your knees in silence. And you wonder if a night like the one when he healed ten people from blindness, polio and untold miseries will ever come again. An event memorialized by the local press in a saved clipping that Hardy reads to the audience. An evening, they wrote, when “something of highly unusual proportions took place… in Llanblethian.”

One by one we see and hear Francis Hardy, his wife Grace and his manager Teddy alone on the stage delivering winding interconnected monologues—all searching for a catharsis that never comes. They all tell the same three stories about that night in Llanblethian, the day Grace gave birth to and buried a still-born child and the day Francis Hardy is assassinated by four hooligans at a wedding after a failed performance.

Being a Faith Healer is a Bitch

No, I didn’t give it all away. The drama is in the telling. Each character has a different memory of these tragic events. And a different perspective revealed in their back stories. There’s no way for the audience to know what is true. Except for this: it’a bitch being a faith healer; it’s a bitch being a faith healer’s wife; and as Teddy tells it in his comic monologue, his job was easier when he was working for Miss Mulatto and her Pigeons—a dependable crowd pleaser of an act compared to The Fantastic Francis Hardy: Faith Healer.

Standing “O” for the Cast

Faith Healer opened at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls on Friday night to a sold-out house. See it for the masterwork that Friel’s play is. See it for Victor Slezak’s (The Bridges of Madison County) captivating performance of Frank Hardy that is one part Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, one part Rod Serling. See it for the 40-minute stream of existential angst that flows from Elisabeth S. Rodgers (Law & Order) like a burst pipe. All while chain smoking herbal cigarettes, chasing Irish whisky and maintaining a Donegal accent. (You’re a great Director Owen Thompson but give the poor girl a break. A personal injury lawyer could make a bundle on what he is doing to her.)

And see it for the brilliant comedic relief from Michael Daly (Negligent Shakespeare Company.) James Corden has nothing on you Michael.

There are ten more performances on Friday, Saturdays and Sundays through December 22 at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls.