Playwright: Brian Friel. At: The Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: 773-398-7028; www.thedentheatre.com; $28. Runs through: Jan. 20
In 1950, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon introduced the drama of conflicting testimonialsa narrative structure copied to this day. In this cinematic classic, four witnesses to a rape/murder recount the circumstances of the crime, but since all of them have reason to lie, whose version is true?
The traumatic incidents in Brian Friel's 1979 drama are even more nebulous in their isolation. Our raconteurs are Francis "Frank" Hardy, the itinerant faith healer of the title, his consort Grace (who may, or may not, be his legally-wedded wife) and his manager, Teddy. The topics under scrutiny encompass a solitary burial in a Scottish pasture for Grace's stillborn child and a severepossibly fatalbeating suffered by Frank on their first night in Ireland. Oh, and one, or even two, of these confidantes might be ghosts, speaking from the grave.
Who are we to believe? How much of Frank's introspection on his gift is the fabrication of a boy aspiring to greater triumphs than his humble lineage offers? How much of Grace's insight into the motives of her companionsthe eccentric invocation music required to conjure Frank's powers, for exampleis colored by rejection of her stuffy middle-class family? Literary convention would seem to dictate that Teddy's account be the one we accept as factuntil we can no longer deny his storyteller's tendency to exaggeration and sentimentalizing.
When the Turnaround Theatrenamed for its home in a tiny shed at the end of a CTA routeintroduced Friel's play to Chicago audiences in 1995, it became the production against which all subsequent ones would be measured. For this revival, Wicker Park's Den Theatre has reassembled that seminal company's director and castrespectively, J.R. Sullivan, Si Osborne, Lia D. Mortensen and Brad Armacost. All make good use of the 17 intervening years, with countenances reflecting the weariness of age and experience. Osborne's Frank had lost none of his existential anomie, nor Mortensen's Grace her suppressed anger, or Armacost's Teddy his mercurial mischief, their contradictory confidencesdelivered in relentlessly straightforward monologuegenerating a suspense that rivets our attention for two and a half hours of the show's running time.
Be warned, too: Whatever else you may take home afterward, you will never hear the Fred Astaire recording of Jerome Kern's "The Way You Look Tonight" in quite the same way again.