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NEW YORK -- Tuesday night, while the rest of the country was tuned into that enduring affliction called American Idol, I was enjoying the perfect antidote.
You wouldn't know it from watching Idol, but the whole point of singing is to tell a distinctive story, to honor a set of words and music with some version of emotional truth. This is also true of acting, which at its best has its own music, its particular, affecting use of tone, rhythm and dynamics.
A case in point -- three of them, in fact -- are now on display at Broadway's Booth Theatre, where director Jonathan Kent's Dublin-based production of Brian Friel's The Faith Healer (*** 1/2 out of four) opened Thursday.
Friel's 1979 play is constructed as a series of monologues, revealing highly individual, sometimes conflicting takes on a set of circumstances. Faith Healer opens and concludes with the testimony of its title character, Frank Hardy, a middle-aged Irishman who has devoted his adult life to "a ministry without responsibility," traveling around offering miracle cures to the desperate and despairing.
In between we hear from Grace, Frank's long-suffering lover and caregiver (and if you believe her rendition of events, his wife), and Teddy, his long-suffering manager. Their devotion--and Frank's apparent view of them as reliable, if often frustrating, servants -- is offset by anger and ruefulness, and by Frank's own considerable self-doubt.
Through their contrasting accounts, Friel movingly examines the complex relationship between strength and vulnerability, self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice, and the subjectivity of all human experience.
In the title role, Ralph Fiennes, returning to Broadway for the first time since his Tony Award-winning turn 11 years ago in Hamlet (also directed by Kent, originally for the UK's Almeida Theatre), again delivers the nuanced intensity that makes him one of our most compelling stage and screen actors. His Frank is at once defeated and defiant, a ravaged man who nonetheless retains the fire that drew, and singed, his enablers.
Fellow Tony winner Cherry Jones is, likewise, predictably captivating as Grace, adding to the string of vanity-free bravura performances with which she has spoiled Broadway audiences in recent years.
And Ian McDiarmid is fiercely funny and heart-rending as the flamboyant but haunted Teddy, who for all his protestations of professional detachment is an integral member of Frank and Grace's dysfunctional, interdependent family.
As traced here, that family's strange journey offers proof that true interpretive artists are still being nurtured in commercial art. Some commercial art , at least.
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