The reading: Faith Healer by Brian Friel (who may or may not have been a part of Riverdance at some point).

The question: Each of the three characters is telling a different version of the same stories.  Who’s telling the truth?

The initial response: Heck if I know.

The extended explanation: Be aware, I’ll be going into major spoilers in this blog post, so if you haven’t read the play . . . well, you’ve been warned.

So there are three characters: Frank the Faith Healer, Gracie, his wife, and Teddy, his manager.  Each has a unique point of view of the past events of their partnership, and each reveals these events to us in a monologue.  Some events coincide between stories, such as the mass healing, so it’s safe to assume that these really happened.  However, there are some major discrepancies between accounts.

For example, no one can agree who chose the music for the act.  Frank blames Teddy, Gracie says it was Frank, and Teddy claims it was Gracie.  More importantly, no one seems to remember the miscarriage the same way.  Gracie says Frank was there taking a major role in events as a husband and a father should.  Teddy thinks he was there for Gracie while Frank went off and left them.  And Frank denies, even to himself, that anything happened.  When the three go to Ireland and heal a man’s finger, Frank remembers the locals initiating the healing, Gracie thinks it was Frank who started it, and Teddy was too drunk to remember anything.

With discrepancies like this, who can we trust?  Who is telling the truth?  Personally, I’m most inclined to trust Teddy.  Even with his fantastic stories about bagpiping dogs and pigeon whisperers, he has the least reason to lie.  He’s definitely inclined to exaggerate, being a manager of impossible acts, and he’d certainly want to throw a good light on the man he works for and the woman he loves.  Even so, he seems like the most stable, honest person in the group (which isn’t saying much).

Gracie is suffering from the effects of a trauma, and even before then she wasn’t exactly mentally stable.  Her mother was described as crazy, so if the condition is genetic, it might explain why Gracie’s mind is so delicate.  She’s devoted to Frank, even though their relationship is often unhealthy, so she’s inclined to make him out to be a hero.  At the same time, she paints him as her torturer, always out to hurt her.  Her confused, traumatized mind is not my information source of choice.

Frank is worse than all of them, even though he seems the sanest at first.  He constantly reinvents the world around him to suit his taste.  It wasn’t his father who died, it was his mother.  Gracie is his mistress, not his wife.  But Frank’s worst lie of all is that he has deluded us, the audience, into thinking he is actually still alive.  (I did warn you about that spoiler thing.) A man who is still spouting untruths after his death is definitely not a trustworthy man.

Who is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?  Not a soul in this play.

But my head hurts.  A lot.