(It’s DC Jenn again, with more on my visit…)

One of the reasons for my trip up to NYC this weekend was to see “Faith Healer,” the Brian Friel play now in previews at the Booth Theatre. With three acting powerhouses – Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones, and Ian McDiarmid – I hoped to be in for an afternoon of genius and I wasn’t disappointed. Directed by Jonathan Kent in a sparse production evoking the chilly atmosphere of northern Scotland and Wales, this acting trifecta lived up to their brilliant reputations and did justice to a play that tackles rough questions and brutal circumstances while somehow also managing to be downright funny.

Composed of four monologues that build on conflicting and collaborating versions of the characters’ lives leading up to a violent act, it tricks you by beginning with the least reliable character. The play then turns on a mounting fear as pieces of the puzzle jolt the audience as it slowly moves to its inevitable conclusion. The surprise of humour in the face of such bleak circumstances is a delight that is purely Irish but also again lulls you into a sense of complacency – nothing bad can happen, it will all work out in the end. Of course it doesn’t, and along the way such high topics as ambition, sacrifice, greed, artistic prostitution are teased out in a surprisingly non-preachy way.

I won’t spoil the plot or the conclusion, merely say that it’s worth it to try and get tickets to see these actors at the top of their game. Fiennes embues his conflicted faith healer with the easy shuffling gait of a showman, seducing the audience with his soft voice and self-deprecating humour at first introduction, then smashing it in cold fury at the end. A difficult balance which he plays brilliantly. Jones has a tough part in the wife who collapses in a frenzy of nerves before your eyes – a lesser actor would drown in the maudlin possibilities, but she is perfectly tense, an unwilling sacrifice to the healer’s egoism. And McDiarmid, one of my favorite actors, delivers an absolute acting master class – his always impressive vocal range is in full display here, and his bittersweet manager completes the heart-rending evocation of the squalor that accompanies talent on the way down.

New York audiences are lucky to be able to catch such an acting trifecta of this caliber, not to mention a playwright and a director of the highest standards. If you can, go see it, and prepare to be challenged, drawn in, and moved deeply.