A Maze of Monologues : Director challenges audience, actors with literate,bare-bones ‘The Faith Healer’ at Odyssey Theatre

“We’re not really trained to come to the theater and listen,” director Jack Rowe theorized. “We need a little bit of MTV in our plays, don’t we?”

That’s the inherent challenge of Brian Friel’s bare-bones “The Faith Healer” (opening this weekend at the Odyssey Theatre’s new site, 2055 Sepulveda Blvd. in West Los Angeles). The piece is entirely made up of monologues: by the titular faith healer, his wife and his manager. The characters appear separately and do not interact with each other; their monologues are delivered directly to the audience.

“You only have the actor and the words,” Rowe emphasized. “It’s minimal sets and properties: a table, four chairs, a record player. It’s very naked stuff for the actors--no place to hide. I really believe the stage is the last verbal medium we have. It’s rare when you see a film script that is both literate and the primary thing that’s being dealt with. Most of the time in film, the visual language tells the tale.”

The play (which starred James Mason when it bowed on Broadway in 1980) takes place in various remote villages in Scotland and Wales; Rowe presumes the period is from the 1930s to the 1950s. “I think there is some purposeful ambiguity,” he said, referring to apparent contradictions in the characters’ stories. “But it’s not like ‘Rashomon,’ where you’re trying to figure out what really happened. All the things the characters are telling you are true--from their own point of view.”

Rowe, 45, has enjoyed sifting through that maze with his cast (Judy Geeson, Neil Hunt and John Horn), whom he generally rehearsed with one-on-one.

“There’s a lot of tension in all the monologues; the memories are very charged for the characters,” he noted. “My job is to sit down with the actors and sort of slough it out: ‘What do you think is happening to her here? Here’s another change--let’s go back and try this.’ It’s like detective work in a way. Very seductive too, because when it’s just two of you together in a room, you can spend a day going down these lovely primrose paths.”

With the staging on its feet, Rowe, a Pennsylvania native, can turn his attention to his duties at USC, where he’s taught since 1978. As producer of the drama division, Rowe also supervises a minimum of 20 student plays each year and usually directs one of those himself.

“Since I’ve been there, I’ve done several Restoration comedies, three or four Shakespeares and a couple of original plays,” he said. “As one’s hair gets grayer--or thinner--sometimes the venue is not as important as the project. At this point in my life, I don’t want to be six weeks in Kansas City, six weeks here, six weeks there. And this year--dare I say it?--I’m actually going to do a production of ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ with the students. Now where else is that opportunity going to come along?”

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Actually, Rowe’s relationship with USC goes way back--to the time he was an undergraduate student majoring in economics.

“When I was a senior, my roommate said, ‘Come down and take a drama class--they’re really easy,’ ” he recalled. “That appealed to me. So I took one of the technical classes, stagecraft, and got absolutely bitten. The next semester, I auditioned for something--scared out of my wits, I’d never done anything on stage--and got the part. On the first night, when my scene was over and people applauded, well, that was it for me.”

After graduation, Rowe was drafted (he got to wait out the time in Indiana); when he returned to Los Angeles, he hooked up with a group of USC grads who’d formed the Company Theatre, working out of a small space on Robertson Boulevard.

“It was a bunch of very young people trying to figure out how to do this stuff,” he said of the group, generally regarded as the experimental influence in local theater in the ‘60s and ‘70s. “But it was the best training ground you could possibly hope for. We were doing a new play every eight weeks, running a real repertory. At one time, we had four different bills of shows going.

“I don’t think when we started we had a philosophy,” he added. “But as we began doing things, certain ideas developed. For me, it was about doing new work, trying to get out of the realistic tradition a bit and explore things with form. It was also a sense that it belonged to the people in it. We were our own producers, our own directors. We did our own publicity, hung our own lights. We built the bathrooms together, mopped the stage, schlepped the chairs out every night.”

The group folded in the mid-’70s.

“Ultimately, it ended because you can’t do free theater for the rest of your life,” he said. “When you’re 21, it’s one thing, but when you’re 35 . . . you may still have the same passion and the same mental energy, but it does take a little longer to climb up and down the ladder, change those lights. Still, there was a feeling of being in the trenches together, taking care of each other. That experience really spoiled me for the profession.”