Faith Healer

Diego Arciniegas is so busy behind the scenes of Boston theater--directing, teaching, serving as the Publick Theatre's Artistic Director, even preparing his own translations of scripts, such as with last summer's production of The Seagull--that one might forget what a fine actor he is.

Until he sets foot on stage: then Arciniegas' sheer magnetism creates a spell that holds an audience in a state of excitement. Such is the case with the Publick's final production of its 2008 season, Brial Fiel's play Faith Healer, in which three characters relate, through monologues, the extraordinary career of Francis "Frank" Hardy, an Irishman who travels the countryside, visiting small villages in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and offering his erratic gift of healing to the blind, the infirm, and the injured.

Frank's ability is far from reliable, as is his memory: the stories Franks tells are corroborated in some respects by the accounts of his wife Grace (Susanne Nitter) and his manager, Teddy (Gabriel Kuttner).

That's right: the faith healer has a manager, the way any traveling performer would. The play does not shy away from the fact that even a real, live miracle worker still relies on showmanship to sell his gift, and as such he needs a good manager, someone who knows the ins and outs of life on the road. If that sounds mundane, that's evidently the way Friel wanted it to sound: the play tells us that even on the night of Hardy's greatest triumph, the healing of 10 people in quick succession, there were no cries of astonishment or shouts of praise and glory--just a solemn shaking of hands and a large donation by a grateful Welsh farmer.

That's not to say there's no religious undertone here: the haling in question takes place in a church; Frank recites the names of villages he's been through in a swift drone, the Welsh names twisting and snapping as though he were speaking in tongues; and, as prophets and holy men are often depicted, Frank struggles with doubt and with his own worst instincts, moving slowly and with what might be a divine form of deliberation toward a moment of sacrifice.

Seeing Arciniegas, Nitter, and Kuttner on stage together once more--they last appeared together a couple of years ago in the Publick's production of Noel Coward's Design for Living--is something of a treat, and both Nitter (who also starred in last summer's repertory productions of The Seagull and Hay Fever) and Kuttner match Diegas for intensity and slow, burning character: there's a feeling that director Nora Hussey has guided each actor through an individual process to bring him or her to a place where each monologue, while told from a different perspective, still feels of a piece with the stories told by the other two.

The set (by Dahlia Al-Habieli) and lighting (by Ken Loewit) are minimalist and effective: for the play's duration we're caught in a bubble universe poised between the realm of the miraculous and earthly heartbreak, and if not even Frank, Grace, and Teddy know for sure what, exactly, the healer's gift means, the ambiguity of his successes and the definitiveness of his failures are set in careful opposition to one another, giving the play a grounded realism.

Memory, perception, reality: nothing seems certain by the end of the play, but Friel makes a compelling trade-off, putting something better than magic or mysticism into the script. Perhaps it is faith... or, as Frank has it, faith in faith.