Artist Interview: The Creative Team of FAITH HEALER
Peter DeLaurier, Anthony Lawton, Ian Merrill Peakes, and Geneviève Perrier on reuniting in person and relishing Brian Friel’s rich language
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company February 1 through March 3, 2024, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer is a reunion of sorts for director Peter DeLaurier and actors Anthony Lawton, Ian Merrill Peakes, and Geneviève Perrier. This team worked together on another Friel monologue play at the Lantern: Molly Sweeney, which filmed and streamed during the height of the pandemic in 2020/21. With Faith Healer, they work together again — this time, in the same room and for a live audience. Lantern Resident Dramaturg Meghan Winch shares this conversation about reuniting for Faith Healer, sharing their work with a live audience, and relishing the rich words of Brian Friel.
MEGHAN WINCH: What was it like to get the band back together, so to speak, on another Brian Friel monologue play — but this time, live and in person?
PETER DELAURIER: Geneviève, Ian, and Tony are among the best players in our region. I was blessed to be able to work with them in 2020. I was more than doubly blessed to work with them again this year. Molly Sweeney and Faith Healer are not only similar in form, but they also share settings and character backgrounds — Grace’s family and Molly’s family are similar in many ways. We were able to hit the ground running on this production and it paid off in our quickly getting to important discoveries.
GENEVIÈVE PERRIER: To be in a room together after Zoom rehearsals and passing each other on the way to film Molly Sweeney has changed the temperature of the work. In the first week, we were able to sit and really listen and make observations and discoveries about each other’s monologues that revealed truths or questions about our own. To be in the room again with Ian, Tony, and Peter is amazing. I respect them all for their talent and insight, and I am grateful to be a part of the “band.”
ANTHONY LAWTON: The company is an ideal bunch to produce a play with. Professionalism, cheerfulness and affection, mutual respect, humility, devotion to quality, respect and curiosity for the author and his theme — these are the hallmarks of this ensemble.
IAN MERRILL PEAKES: This is a lovely group of supportive humans, and it is a lovely dressing room. To be able to hear each other doing their bit is so much better than not doing that.
WINCH: What excites you most about the play? What’s been the most rewarding element, and what’s been the biggest challenge?
PEAKES: I’m most excited by the constant discoveries. This play is so layered, and there are clues everywhere — and I keep finding more. So the challenge is allowing those discoveries to exist fully and remain in the show we rehearsed. Different things on different days feel true to Francis. Confidently doing a very much living piece of theater is both challenging and rewarding.
LAWTON: What excites me most about this play is the elaborate and idiosyncratic world — psychological, spiritual, social, and cultural — that Friel builds out of language. To learn the words is to learn the world of these persons. The surprising twists in the language correspond to the surprising wrinkles in the minds and lives we’re bringing to life. There is music, rhythm, feeling, and story in the language that does a lot of the acting for us. It is a great pleasure to learn and master a linguistic score like this. In slipping into the language, we slip into the character, as if the language were the character’s skin, which we put on like a garment. The characters are lovable, and handicapped by their finite resources in coping with an infinite mystery. That theme — confronting the infinite with finite resources — is one I never tire of in theater.
It’s a hell of a lot of words, and a lot of them come in a weird order. They are hard to learn. But like well-composed music, the words of a well-written play pay dividends to the actor who learns them with accuracy. For a piece this long (52+ minutes for me), I usually need about 100 hours of solid, solitary repetition to become confident of the words. To avoid distraction, I often sit in my car under the I-95 freeway near Columbus and Reed when I’m drilling lines. I’m always afraid cops are going to hassle me.
DELAURIER: These Irish “storytelling” plays can be fiendishly difficult to keep active. Plays are not written of words; they are wrought of dramatic action — human need in conflict. That’s why their creators are not called playwriters, but playwrights — like shipwrights or iron wrights. A story told because it’s a good story can still be deadly dull onstage. An actor needs, at every moment, to be effecting change in someone physically present in order to overcome an obstacle and achieve an objective. And that was our work on this play: “Who am I talking to? What do I want, what’s in my way, what do I do (and to whom) to get it?” That moment in rehearsal when these questions come together and are answered is exhilarating. It was a challenge and a delight to keep these stories active — told because they had to be in that way at that moment. The “why” of the moment was especially challenging. A big part of my job was to help the actors link back and forward in the text to understand the connections between moments and how something triggers the next line, or how a diversion is still part of the longer point the character is trying to build to.
WINCH: What was it like to build your own isolated speech while also being a member of an ensemble? How much effect did the other monologues have on your own?
LAWTON: In a monologue piece like this, one works a lot more on one’s own than one does in a true ensemble piece. But we did some work together in the first week or so, to make sure we were all living in the same world and weren’t missing any details. (In a piece of this subtlety, there are clues that are easy to miss. Sometimes a fellow ensemble member has an insight that eludes the actor in question.)
PEAKES: This play is all monologues but entirely an ensemble piece as well. We all have to be in the same world and so there was so much I took from what the others did and do. So helpful to hear their versions of truth.
WINCH: This is a serious play about serious topics, but there is humor throughout; how did you find and shape those moments of levity?
PERRIER: To be honest, I didn’t know my piece had any moments of levity until I got in front of an audience. By the time it happens, it feels as though we collectively need it.
DELAURIER: Humor, like pathos, comes out of truth. We make the moment real for the actor and the character, and, if it’s well crafted by the playwright — and, in this case, it always is — it’s surprising and funny for the audience.
PEAKES: Humor is key when doing a heavy piece. Our playwright lets us know that it is welcome. I’m a huge believer that you cannot have tragedy without comedy as a gauge to measure it. So while Grace and Frank are not comics, we mined all the real laughs we could. And Teddy’s tragic side is elevated by all the laughs.
LAWTON: As in all plays (and life), humor is a mechanism that raises one above unavoidable suffering. It is a psychological survival technique, a human go-to. Humor requires intelligence, imagination, and pluck, which are sympathetic qualities that endear a character to the audience. Irony and ridicule can give one a sense of superiority over adverse circumstances. A tonic and a superpower in a bitter world.
WINCH: How important to your work was knowing the factual truth of events, versus what was true to the individual characters? How do you navigate the demands of these two layers of truth?
DELAURIER: I had to know my version of the truth of each moment; however, those facts are contradicted by various characters in their stories. I did not often share these with the actors who needed to know their own truths. There were times when each character told versions that did not agree with others. Sometimes these were known untruths, sometimes they were believed to be true because they were the way the character needed to remember the event to keep going. In general, in the rehearsal room, we all agreed that Teddy was the most reliable narrator, Grace and Frank, in reaction to their trauma, misremembered certain events, and Frank also chose to tell untruths for effect.
PERRIER: For Gracie, I believe she knows the truth about a seminal moment in her life. But, when she recounts it, she purposefully alters the telling of it. I believe she does so out of pain, out of need, out of protection of her own psyche. It’s a challenge every time I perform it to feel that out. But, when I can “successfully” connect to the underbelly, it propels the story forward for me in understanding her and the play in greater form.
WINCH: What have you learned from audiences? What would you like them to take away?
PEAKES: I don’t think Friel gives much of a damn about the question, “Who are you talking to?” He doesn’t provide much information, I don’t think, to answer that question. The closest I can come to answering that question is: “same person Hamlet’s talking to.” The same person I talk to when my mind is running on in its perpetual inner monologue. When that imaginary audience becomes a real audience, there is a slight adjustment. We learn from the audience about when we get ahead of them and they can’t catch up, and when they get ahead of us and lose interest. The audience teaches us a lot about pace, timing, specificity, and clarity. David Mamet argues that the best acting teacher in the world is a live audience.
PERRIER: This play is a mystery about some of the greater human experiences in our lives: tragedy, truth, love, connection, isolation, memory, and loss. I hope that the audience is provoked to talk after the show about it all or about whatever is honestly roused for them.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Faith Healer by Brian Friel is onstage February 1 through March 3, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
