Tynan's Anger

While the Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park is a limited space, director Mikhael Tara Garver of Uma Productions has made the most of it and then some in her production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. Instead of entering through the theater, the audience is led by crew members through a back alley to the cramped basement, just as you would to attend the services of a real Irish faith healer. That introduction makes the makeshift stage and seating all the more authentic, and if you can ignore the Chicago hipster audience, it sets the mood for the play perfectly.

Faith Healer is a classic of contemporary theater and has recently been brought back into the spotlight by a successful Broadway revival starring Ralph Fiennes and Cherry Jones. Garver has given the play a fantastic, remarkably professional production that belies its humble venue. While the set is used effectively, Garver’s greatest accomplishment comes from making full use of her actors potential.

The play, a series of four monologues delivered by three characters, is masterful particularly for the interaction and contrast between the characters takes on the events and for the emotions which all three discuss. What Frank (Chris Hainsworth) says about his relationship with his mistress Grace (Danica Ivanicek) or his manager Teddy (James Joseph) may not be what Grace or Teddy believes. We hear stories of Grace being barren, of Teddy’s career managing dogs before Frank, of Frank’s struggles with his parents, and of the highs and lows in Frank’s success in faith healing. The same stories become constantly updated and put into a larger perspective with each passing monologue. In fact, the monologues mesh so well that they give a better understanding of the characters and narrative than a dialogue-based play could provide.

Although Frank is the title character and the only one with two monologues, the stars of the performances have to be Ivanicek and Joseph. Frank’s introductory monologue does not imply the instability that Ivanicek immediately insinuates, and we see her struggle, and ultimately fail, to talk her way out of her trapped relationship with Frank. Her performance is a remarkable display of femininity, repression, and neurosis, and Ivanicek can change the meaning of a line with the slightest twitch of her face. Joseph, meanwhile, displays remarkably convincing Cockney showmanship, providing a comical element that does not at all seem shallow when dealing with the tragedies the play unfolds.

Hainsworth’s performance does not compare to those of the rest of the cast. However, though it is not nearly as perfect, as an actor he clearly understands his character and maintains a cool confidence crucial to Frank’s character. Although we can see how he could easily acquire someone’s trust, it’s also clear that we are not quite sure of his motivations. In his first monologue, this seems to violate his main strength as a character; how could anyone trust a man who has such a sinister side?

Of course, Frank is not trying to heal us; he is talking about his life, which leads to another great strength of Faith Healer. We are faced with a man who is discussing his life with remarkable clarity, and we immediately accept this relationship with the character. By the second act, however, the circumstances of his presentation become murkier and even a bit supernatural. When Frank delivers his final monologue, it concludes as a message from beyond the grave. This deception, while not really a secret, makes Faith Healer one of the most creatively structured plays of the last century, maintaining a subtlety possible only in theater.

The play’s writing is so crisp and immediate that even the most casual theatergoer can appreciate it, and considering how strong the performances are in a largely actor-driven play, Uma Production’s Faith Healer is already one of the highlights of the winter season of Chicago theater. That such an exceptional production can come in such a small space from an unheralded theater company is a perfect example of the unique, bottom-up nature of Chicago’s vibrant theater scene. While Broadway in Chicago is experiencing unprecedented levels of success, it would be a shame if the large Loop productions eroded one of America’s most inspiring artistic business models. Even so, if Uma keeps putting out productions like this one, not even Wicked can prevent it from becoming one of Chicago’s elite theaters.

Walking into the Gunder Mansion at the North Lakeside Cultural Center is like entering the year 1910. The location feels like the summer house of an upper-middle class family from a century ago, which lends itself perfectly to Collage Productions’ performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. In fact, it lends itself too perfectly: The production seems so realistic that it’s unsettling to sit through. This is not your typical setting for a play—setting a play in a beach house where the actors often stand with their backs to the audience is, shall we say, a tad ambitious. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that it is Clayton J. Horath’s directorial debut, or that Horath chose O’Neill, one of the most difficult playwrights to produce, for his initiation, or that he wrote a score for the play as well.

From the very beginning it’s clear that Horath has taken on more than he can handle, as the actors struggle to delve inside their characters and it becomes impossible to connect the spoken lines with the bodies who speak them. In a production of an O’Neill play, that disconnection can only produce one thing: disaster.

To be fair, much of the blame can be placed on O’Neill, and not Horath, for making the play so impossible to navigate. As Mary McCarthy, the legendary theater critic for the Partisan Review, said in 1946, O’Neill “did not possess the slightest ear for spoken word.” While it is clear that O’Neill developed his complex and conflict-laden characters brilliantly, he seemed to possess no intuition for how to convey such complex characters without having his characters discuss their own psychology outright.

From the first five minutes of the play, O’Neill shoves this down our throats, as the characters discuss the drug addiction, alcoholism, sickliness, miserliness, and depression without any nuance or banter. While that kind of talk is great on paper, it doesn’t reflect how people actually speak. The fact that McCarthy pointed this out is a sign of the fact that O’Neill’s appeal was not theatrical. While more literary-minded critics heralded Long Day’s Journey as perhaps the most realistic portrayal of a crumbling American family in terms of characterization, it’s a painfully unrealistic play to watch for anyone with sensitivity to dialogue.

It’s this type of approach that makes Collage Productions’s rendition so bad. Jeff Helgeson recites the lines of father James Tyrone like John Wayne in his worst movies. As the vagabond older brother Jamie, Jeff McVann seems more focused on remembering his lines—and indeed, he struggles with his lines throughout the production—than understanding his character’s contradictions. As the mentally unstable, morphine-addicted mother, Barbara Button is so unconfident about her lines that she seems afraid to say them. As a result, her voice is so quiet that it’s impossible to hear her.

Long Day’s Journey doesn’t require the actors to think about their characters—every detail of their psychology is in the dialogue. The play requires something much more complex from the directors and actors: They must not only maximize the impact of the dialogue, but also make the dialogue believable. By employing actors who are not only detached from the dialogue but who also don’t seem to care, the worst parts of the play are brought to the forefront, thus making the production impossible to sit through. In fact, the indifference of the actors is absurdly self-referential: Like the characters they depict, the actors are stuck in a position they hate with no concern for how they treat their circumstances or the people they affect (in this case, the audience).

There are other serious problems with the production as well. The set-up of the play’s set, despite being dramaturgically fascinating, is an acoustical nightmare. Lines that are spoken from five feet away seem 50 feet away, so that much of what little power the delivery has is lost. The other main problem is the score, written by Horath himself. In fact, from both the program and his own introduction, Horath seems to consider himself more of a composer than a director. This hurts the credibility of the play, especially when the music—played mostly in major keys—contrasts sharply with the tense arguments that are taking place on stage.

While Horath and his cast certainly took on a difficult job in choosing to produce Long Day’s Journey, they fell flat due to poor decision making and sloppy production. While it may be acceptable for the Tyrones to put on a play at this level, it is certainly not acceptable for a professional theater company in Chicago.