STAGE REVIEW : A Compelling ‘Touch’ From Ensemble Arts

A man professing to be a healer comes to a depressed, Welsh working-class town, where he meets three lonely women, all with chronic physical ailments.

He “treats” each of them, and their lives do change, but not in the ways they expect. They are left wondering, in the aftermath, if he was really a healer or just a heel, a con artist with a knack for getting women’s money and sexual favors.

These questions are never resolved in “The Touch,” an American premiere by Welsh playwright Peter Lloyd that opened Thursday in an arresting production by Ensemble Arts Theatre at the 59-seat Fritz Theater downtown.

Instead, they and other questions linger at the end of the show, to fascinate and disturb.

Ensemble Arts, a homeless local company specializing in American premieres of little-known works, has developed a reputation for doing lush technical jobs with flawed scripts. Here, the set by the company’s artistic director, Glyn Bedington, is devoid of the company’s usual flash: Cardboard boxes represent a supermarket check-out stand on one end of the stage, a table and chairs become a restaurant on the other, the healer’s examining table becomes his office in center stage.

Lighting by Douglas Gabrielle is minimal--there are but a handful of lights to work with in the Fritz. And the sound design by Karin Williams is limited to the new-age sea-washing-against-the-shore tapes the healer plays for his clients as he probes their psyches.

But the script is the best the company has selected to date.

Williams, who also directed, keeps the 90-minute intermissionless play realistic, affecting and swift.

The acting captures the charged relationship among the women, who are all old friends. It creates sparks between them and the healer, whom they alternately exalt and distrust.

As Vincent the healer, Walter Murray plays on a wealth of ambiguities in this character; he seems to confuse even himself as to what extent his mission is to help others and to what extent it is to help himself.

Still, Murray’s Vincent exudes genuine power over the women. One of his secrets--perhaps his chief one--is that he talks to them in a way other men never do. He finds out that Tracy (Lisa Viertel), who has certain sexual problems, had a father who abandoned her when she was little. He discerns that Dawn (Pauline Whitaker), who suffers from depression, feels trapped in her life. He discovers that Sue (Christina Courtenay) is in yet another unhappy relationship because she is rich and believes that people love her only for her money.

The women, too, do a fine job in alternately trying to hide and reveal their natures. Courtenay brings great control to her repressed Sue. Whitaker gives a street-smart edge to Dawn, and Viertel’s Tracy has a steely resistance under a soft demeanor.

“The Touch” is shot through with echoes of the film “Resurrection,” in which Ellen Burstyn plays a healer who genuinely has an ability to absorb other people’s pain and cure them. But there are just as many echoes of the play “The Rainmaker” (later made into a film), in which a man promising rain from the heavens is quite clearly a con artist, even though in the end he brings rain of another sort to the heart of a lonely woman by making her believe in herself.

“The Touch” is ultimately less about Vincent and whether he is or isn’t the real thing than it is about his patients. Whether Vincent has “the touch” can be debated forever. But, as long as people are as needy as the three women in this play, they will always be wrestling with their better judgment in a desperate search for some kind of “healing.”

“THE TOUCH”

By Peter Lloyd. Director is Karin Williams. Set design by Glyn Bedington. Lighting by Douglas Gabrielle. Costumes by Karin Williams and cast. Sound by Karin Williams. Mural by Laura Crouch. Stage manager is Ed Vogel. With Walter Murray, Christina Courtenay, Lisa Viertel and Pauline Whitaker. Tickets are $14-$16. Performances at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday through June 28. At the Fritz Theater, 338 7th Ave., San Diego. Call 696-0458.