STAGE REVIEW : An Austere ‘Faith Healer’ at Odyssey

The new Odyssey Theatre opened Sunday night. There is work to be done on the building, but there was nothing unfinished about its first show, Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer.”

The Odyssey’s new address is 2055 S. Sepuleveda Blvd., north of Olympic Boulevard, an arc-lit industrial block where every second building is an auto-body shop. Brecht would have loved the neighborhood and the building too. Its shell is an empty warehouse that the city is letting Ron Sossi’s company use for $1 a year. Where some theaters spend big bucks to achieve that exposed-pipe look, the new Odyssey was born to it.

It also promises to be a more coherent structure than the old Odyssey, which was really a confederation of storefronts. Here, all three playing spaces will feed off the main lobby, as at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Only one of the spaces is ready at the moment, and it wasn’t clear until Saturday that it would be ready. You would have forgiven the cast of “Faith Healer” for being a bit distracted Sunday night, but they were as precise as if they were doing laser-beam surgery.

That’s absolutely necessary in “Faith Healer.” It’s an austere piece, as intimate as chamber music, but without the interplay that is one of the pleasures of chamber music. Its three characters tell the same story, but they tell it separately, never appearing on the stage together.

Nor do they act the story. What happened happened some time ago. What they are playing is the memory of what happened, and each has reason to remember the past differently.

The listener has to look at all the stories and decide what really happened. It’s also left to him to imagine what these three people were like when they were a team touring the village halls--the faith healer (John Horn); his wife (she claims she was his wife--Judy Geeson) and his impresario (Neil Hunt.)

The story is as convoluted as the faith healer himself, and there is no doubt as to the fact that he was a devious man indeed. In fact he takes pride in it. Horn gets first crack at us, and within two minutes we are in the palm of his hand. The character has so many faces that he can’t help changing them, and Horn refuses to make it easy for us by deciding which is the real one.

Just as you decide that this is a cynic drowning in his own bile (an Archie Rice of the religion business), he’ll say something amusing--and be truly amused by it himself. At first you thought of Jamie in “A Moon for the Misbegotten.” But as Horn went on, you also thought of Mephistopheles in “Dr. Faustus.” The devil, they say, is a good host.

Geeson is equally divided, but it’s a more painful division, that of a woman whose hard-won calm can be shattered in a second by a random memory--not even necessarily a painful one (though she has plenty of these as well). This is a woman fighting to command her past, a task as vain, sometimes, as telling the North Atlantic to be still.

Then we hear from Hunt, as the impresario. We’re looking for him to be an obsequious fellow, for that’s how the other two remember him. In fact, he’s breezy and not nearly as harrowed by the memory of what happened at the faith healer’s last show as expected.

But just as we accept that, changes start to happen here, too. This is not a play where much can be taken at face value--the final surprise being the exaltation of Horn’s last monologue: the exaltation of a devious man finding simplicity (a fatal simplicity) at last.

Who is the faith healer? Only himself, probably. But there’s a moment--curiously, it’s in Geeson’s monologue--when we can see him as a tortured version of Christ, a man with a “gift” that feels like a curse.

The overtone may be accidental, but the dark side of the charismatic’s life is surely one of the play’s themes, and makes it particularly timely just now. We are not, however, dealing in the black-and-white terms of “Elmer Gantry” here. This play really is about the spiritual life.

Jack Rowe directed the four monologues. With three actors this proficient, it was probably basically an editing job, but he has done it well--though we never see the characters together, they are in the same play. Russell Pyle’s set and lighting, and Ritchie M. Spencer’s costumes, are also spare, but absolutely to the point--Geeson’s shapeless sweater, for instance, its pockets no longer giving her hands a real place to hide. “Faith Healer” gets the little things right, beyond which we see the big things.

Plays Thursdays-Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., at 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. Tickets $14.50-$18.50; (213) 477-2055.

‘FAITH HEALER’

Brian Fiel’s play, at the Odyssey Theatre. Produced by Ron Sossi and Lucy Pollack. Director Jack Rowe. Set and lighting design Russell Pyle. Costumes Ritchie M. Spencer. With Judy Geeson, John Horn and Neil Hunt.