Theater : Monologues Make Sense to Damashek : Even when not directing Brian Friel’s ‘Faith Healer’ at SCR, the playwright-composer works in relationships between storytellers and audiences.

The time is late afternoon. The place is South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. Barbara Damashek enters the boardroom. She is slight but has a big voice. She is wearing flower-patterned, skintight pants and a loose-fitting pullover. The boardroom is spare. There is a long oval table with many empty chairs.

Damashek has arrived between rehearsals of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer,” which she is directing. Previews begin Tuesday. She previously has directed “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Happy End” at SCR. She also is a playwright, having written five plays, and a composer-lyricist. Her most widely produced work is “Quilters,” which was nominated for a Tony award as best musical in 1985 and for which she received three Tony nominations: best director, score and book.

Damashek sits down. At her elbow, on the boardroom table, she places a plastic takeout container with a sandwich in it and a drink in a paper cup with a lid on it. She begins to talk. She speaks like a born New Yorker, though she hasn’t lived in New York for years. She never opens the sandwich container. She never takes the lid off the paper cup.

I came fairly late to theater. I just didn’t come from that kind of background, and my parents would have preferred me to be a doctor. That’s what they wanted. But all my life growing up I was always writing things and doing things. It was just always kind of patronized. “Very nice. She does that nicely.”

Then I reached a certain point where I realized “I gotta do this.” Theater is the most biographical story. It’s similar to what “Faith Healer” is all about. The need to tell your story. Your own story. The need to experience someone else’s story to figure out your own story.

I’ve been living in Berkeley for the last nine years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life. I have very unusual digs. A one-room house. My landlord built five little houses on his property, all single occupancy. So it’s just a fluke.

I think I was born in Queens. I’m not sure. I might have been born in Brooklyn. I just don’t know. But I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, and I went to school in Manhattan. Then I left. Went away to college in Buffalo. After that Yale. The drama school. I was in the acting program.

You want to know when I went to Yale? Call Yale.

The basic attraction to storytelling is that it’s an almost ritualistic event, a community need. That’s one of the last things theater still offers, and the media will never be able to compete with.

When you sit in a chair and tell your story to someone--like me with you--it is infinitely different from sitting in front of a cold medium like a screen or being very moved by a wonderful performance that was shot in Greece.

Pause.

“Faith Healer” is a play with no stage directions. Literally. It’s three monologues. Three people speaking separate monologues. I just premiered a play of my own in Milwaukee called “Two Suitcases.” It was based on interviews I conducted with Soviet immigrants who have come here within the last 15 years. All monologues.

The last play I directed before I did my own play was “Dancing at Lughnasa,” another Brian Friel play. So when they came to me with “Faith Healer,” I was laughing because it was some more monologues.

I think monology has surfaced, but it’s particularly timely now for many reasons. I’m not sure that the least of it is for financial reasons. As theaters are cutting back on their budgets, evenings of monology become more and more attractive.

What I consider the private agenda is being exposed or explored in theater now. And it happens through the monologue in a way that doesn’t happen when you’re really in a public situation. It’s a way of saying that the individual needs to speak to us now. It’s being done by cutting-edge artists, but it’s being absorbed into the mainstream.

Pause.

I think monology, because of its very limitations, forces you into a more surreal world. It’s not about “knock on the door. Let me in.” It’s not about those old devices that we’ve depended on to dramatize stories, certainly not in the kinds of ways you get in TV writing. That’s all mechanical.

Monologues are important in a time when we are over-stimulated by computer stuff. Monologues do what theater does that nothing else can do. It’s a way of featuring the intimacy of that live moment. When you are just another person.

I think theater is strongest when it does what only theater can do, not what everything else can preempt. And as technical skills get more sophisticated, movies and TV preempt a lot--because technically, everything else does stuff better than the theater.

There are artists who really do believe that cinema has led us astray, that the medium, because it spells everything out for us, has encouraged us to not emphasize our imagination. But the theater still requires you to do that. You still have to sit through blackouts and imagine nothing was breaking up the scene. You still see actors forget their lines. You still see fallibility on the stage. And then you see that live thing. Brian Friel is profoundly interested in that.

Pause.

The whole nature of “Faith Healer” is dense, and it’s wonderful writing. I can say this truly after spending a year writing my own play. I see how wonderfully constructed it is. Brian Friel is a magnificent storyteller. He has a great literary gift. He’s a poet, too. You get to be in the presence of where the power is. And it’s all in the language.

But even more than that, the action is in the language. Unlike Spalding Gray, who will tell you an episodic story--this happened, and then that happened and it’s like a novel--”Faith Healer” is a living mystery because the nature of this play is not even so much a whodunit as a what-happened.

It’s a little like “Rashomon.” You’re hearing different points of view about the same thing, and part of your task as an audience is to make meaning out of monologues that contradict each other. A big part of the work that we’re doing on the play in rehearsal is just finding meanings.

Pause.

Our production is going to be more physicalized than usual. We’ll have music in it too. I’ve broken through the envelope a little, which is what I always do when I do Friel’s plays. I mean, I don’t obey his stage directions slavishly.

I’d say “Faith Healer” is like a little island in the middle of Brian Friel’s work. It is connected to one of his earliest plays, “Philadelphia Here I Come,” in that it’s an interior landscape. He’s talking from the private voice, the confessional voice, the voice that gives testimony, the voice that doesn’t have to deal with external contradiction or external antagonism. It only has to deal with the inner voices that contradict.

He’s writing about something that is “ineffable” or “liminal.” He’s writing about something between worlds. He’s trying to get inside the inside voice. It’s related to Beckett. It’s on that side of things. Brian Friel writes his people into the existential place, the place where they’re waiting for Godot in their own version of things. They’re about to make a big change in their lives. They’re on the border between life and death.

But Friel’s dramaturgy is not Beckett’s by any means. I think where he wants to live is really close to Beckett. Yet there’s a bit of a tussle between the form and the content. And since my exploration has led me to recognize that this is the dynamic energy, it has freed me to deal with the form and play around with it a little bit.

Pause. Damashek checks watch.

You can never forget that language is a character in this play. It’s a play of liberation, for people who are going on an inner journey to find some inner peace. It’s a language play in the same way that Beckett’s are language plays.

Pause.

If you know Beckett, you will understand that sentence. And if you don’t, I don’t know how to define what that means.

Fade to black.

* Previews of “Faith Healer” begin Tuesday on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The regular run begins April 28. Tickets to the previews are $15 to $25; during the run, admission will be $15 to $34. (714) 957-4033.