Charles McMahon: On Monologue and Memory Plays
The Lantern’s Artistic Director on why the monologue play is a such an effective format for exploring the human psyche
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company February 1 through March 3, 2024, Brian Friel’s masterpiece Faith Healer is a monologue play, featuring three performers across four speeches circling the same two flashpoint events — but bringing their own biases, traumas, and flawed memories to their retellings. “We’ve wanted to do Faith Healer for decades. We first applied for the rights in 2003,” says Lantern Theater Company Artistic Director Charles McMahon.
The Lantern is no stranger to these types of plays. In 2021, the Lantern produced a filmed version of Friel’s other three-performer monologue play, Molly Sweeney, which — like Faith Healer — featured actors Anthony Lawton, Ian Merrill Peakes, and Geneviève Perrier under the direction of Peter DeLaurier. And in 2018, the Lantern produced a revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, another spin on the three-actor monologue play, which featured Charles McMahon among the cast.
“The power of the monologue play is extraordinary. It’s the simplicity that makes it so incredibly effective,” McMahon says. “As we keep making theater, I come to see simplicity as a great virtue. The best food is made by not adding more and more ingredients, but by ultimately taking away the things that that just kind of cloud it. And having fewer points of focus allows you to really focus more on the things that are of critical importance.”
Of the three plays of this genre most recently produced at the Lantern, Faith Healer was written first, in 1979. “I think it had a very formative effect on British theater, Irish theater — all theater,” McMahon says. “It was voted among the 100 most influential plays of the 20th century.”
Friel was an Irish playwright, writing intimately about the unique identities and borders of his homeland. He had a model for the monologue play in another celebrated Irish playwright: Samuel Beckett. “Beckett’s play, Play, is three monologues told independently of each other, but their narratives cut back and forth. Structurally, they are interspersed,” McMahon says. “The characters are reliving the same event from their own perspectives. There aren’t factual inconsistencies between them, but they are definitely different perspectives. The humor and the tragedy of it, in Beckett’s case, is gallows humor.”
Along with the three-actor monologue format, that juxtaposition of humor and pathos is also present in Faith Healer. “It’s just like Play in the blending of tragedy and comedy,” McMahon says. “We’re living in a Greek tragedy; it’s going to go where tragedies go. But along the way, it’s going to be irreverent and conversational and spontaneous and modern.”
In Faith Healer, Friel is using the separate monologues — each character alone onstage as they speak — to explore the individual characters’ psyches, their need for companionship, and the ways they fail each other in their search for connection and home. “It’s the way that these people struggle between the world that they want to live in, and the world they do live in. Struggling between the person that they want to be and the person that they are,” McMahon says. “Even though the characters aren’t on stage at the same time, the way that they are written, you can feel the need that they have, and in life they can never quite get what they need from each other. They can’t get home through each other. But they can persist and they can get a hint of what they need from each other to the point where they’re ready to stay together. But it’s going to destroy them.”
The separate monologues also reinforce each character’s isolation within their own lives. “In essence, we’re dealing with a theme of exile. When we look at how this affects character, there’s the dual nature of Friel’s Irish characters. They’re neither one thing nor another. So they feel like exiles in their own country. They’re in exile in their own minds, in their own spirits, in the world. They’re not at home.”
Friel wrote Molly Sweeney fifteen years after Faith Healer, returning to the monologue format and the three-actor cast, with adjustments to the structure to tell a new story. “Three actors, three characters, never on stage at the same time. The tragedy between them, the married couple and the specialist outsider who becomes part of the triangle. So the geometry of the plays is really similar,” McMahon says of the two Friel plays. “The critical difference is that the monologues intersperse in Molly Sweeney. And they inform one another much more as we go along. You have the different perspectives interwoven.”
“But structurally, Faith Healer has long monologues,” McMahon says. “This is a specific thing about Irish culture. People are raconteurs. Mick Maloney, the Irish folklorist and musician, said that the evolution of Irish raconteurism might have been based on the fact that Irish homesteads were taxed on the basis of how many windows they had.” That resulted, predictably, in houses with very few windows. “So there’s this old Irish storytelling style of people telling stories in dim rooms, and the one telling the stories becomes the most interesting person in the room,” McMahon says. “It’s simple language. And Faith Healer has taken this incredibly rich, complex story, and three people who are struggling with something. They’re incredibly active and they’re telling the stories because they need to.”
Though McMahon considered Faith Healer as a play that could be safely filmed during the pandemic-interrupted 2021/22 season, he turned to Molly Sweeney’s interlocking monologues instead, saving Faith Healer’s unbroken speeches for a time when we could all come together in a room. “We were already experiencing being cut off from what we need during the lockdown, so Molly Sweeney felt like it would work better,” McMahon says. “The crazy thing is that when we chose Molly Sweeney, I was thinking, ‘You know, this is exactly the cast that we would probably work with if we were doing Faith Healer. So that was in my mind at that time. And I talked about it with [director] Peter DeLaurier, and he felt the same way.”
Although the structure is similar and the cast and director are the same, the characters themselves are not. “Each of the three characters is incredibly different,” McMahon says. “And there’s just so much psychological real estate in between Grace and Molly, for instance, or between Ian’s two characters [both named Frank]. He’s kind of a fool, a comic relief character in Molly Sweeney. And in Faith Healer, he is this tragic figure who may have supernatural powers. Or he may not.”
The monologue-memory play has been seen before on the Lantern stage, notably in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen in 2004 and 2018. Werner Heisenberg (played by McMahon), Niels Bohr (Paul L. Nolan), and Bohr’s wife Margrethe (Sally Mercer) tell and retell critical events in their lives related to World War II — often as monologues and sometimes as dialogue that springs from their individual reveries. “There’s no way you could be Michael Frayn and not have Friel’s plays go through your mind at some even unconscious level when you’re writing Copenhagen — three characters on stage at the same time, interacting with each other, going back again and again,” McMahon says. “But Copenhagen’s case, they are scientists collaborating, setting up experiments and then reviewing the results. And they’re reviewing them differently. But they’re doing it in real time. Or real timelessness. It’s a really wonderful, new, different, and totally appropriate variation on the memory play, a post-mortem memory play.”
“Every time they explore the event and they measure a different aspect of it, something that had been clearer earlier becomes more obscure as this other element comes into focus,” McMahon says of Copenhagen’s re-run experiments. “Every aspect of the human psyche, once you really drill down and hone in on this one area, everything else becomes more maddeningly unclear, so that the ultimate source of human motivation, of human longing, of human need, is innately mysterious.”
Copenhagen’s desperate search for individual clarity and an answer to each human’s unique longing is found at the bruised heart of its formal forbear Faith Healer as well. “Copenhagen is a wonderful, wonderful play, and one that I think does in intellectually rigorous way what Faith Healer does in an emotional way,” McMahon says. “These plays do a lot of the same things psychologically, but with different stories, different people, different characters, different themes, different intentions on the part of the authors, different aspects of the psyche being explored.”
For McMahon, these three monologue-memory plays allow for a deep and immediate connection to a storytelling tradition that goes back millennia and is essential to community building. Great playwrights like Friel and Frayn “open their minds, open their imagination, and they take in all these inspirations, and then they work out how to put that into the simplest, the most direct, the most elegant, the most powerful form,” McMahon says. “And I think when we’re looking at something like Faith Healer or Copenhagen or Molly Sweeney, these are ultimately simple stories.”
“Storytelling is at the heart of theater — and why we do theater,” McMahon says. “It’s also at the heart of most communal experiences. Almost everything in a culture is what stories we tell ourselves, because those are our aspirations. It’s the way that we connect with each other. It’s the way that we form communities and have commonalities between individual psyches. Everything we do in theater is a version of that. It’s the people sitting around the community, sitting around the fire together and recounting something that happened, events that they turn into story. It’s how we take some measure of control in our lives, and it’s how we connect with each other. I have to keep remembering this when we make theater, that the person who gets up around the fire and tells this story is taking on a sort of sacred responsibility, because it’s telling everybody’s story.”
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.
