THEATER - "Faith Healer"

Brien Friel’s play, Faith Healer, is not about hope. It’s about hopelessness: three companions, Frank (the faith healer), Grace (his wife), and Teddy (his promoter), who are alone and adrift, even after the twenty-odd years they have spent together. There are very real things that they want—Frank (to be needed), Grace (to be acknowledged), and Teddy (to be loved)—but these things are forever out of reach, even when they are right beside them. The play’s structure, four scene-long monologues (each essentially a one-act play), is therefore quite fitting: together, these stories complete their history, but each appears separately, dismally, and alone. In the end, we realize there is one thing worse than hopelessness: hopeless hope.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps