Guthrie Theater

Irish Times' cultural critic and commentator Fintan O'Toole chronicles
Guthrie Director Joe Dowling's American acting debut in Friel's Faith Healer

As one of Ireland's most respected cultural critics and drama critic for the Irish Times, Fintan O'Tool (former drama critic for the New York Daily News) has had many opportunities to interview Brian Friel - who from a novice under Tyrone Guthrie's eye, developed into one of Ireland's most notable playwrights. On the heels of Friel's 80th birthday celebration in Ireland, O'Toole traveled to Minneapolis last month, marking Guthrie Director Joe Dowling's American acting debut in the title role of Friel's Faith Healer and offering an exclusive lecture for Guthrie patrons.

In today's column, O'Toole chronicles Dowling's exploration of Faith Healer, from his signature production with actor Donal McCann to its latest incarnation, and his decision to return to the stage after a nearly 21 year absence.

Faith Healer continues performances through Sunday, December 6 at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis.

For complete production information, visit http://www.faithhealerlive.com/.

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Hardy role reclaimed from a great
by Fintan O'Toole
Irish Times (November 17, 2009)

MINNEAPOLIS - It was never, ever the intention to become a director, and therefore an artistic director and therefore all of this." The "this" to which the modest little gesture of Joe Dowling's hand refers is probably the most impressive theatre building of the 21st century. We are sitting in a public area high up in the extraordinary new (Tyrone) Guthrie Theatre, which opened in 2006 on the banks of the Mississippi in Minneapolis, writes Fintan O'Toole. 

Jean Nouvel's dreamy, twilight-blue swirl of forms is an architectural masterpiece but also an extraordinary tribute to the impact that Dowling has had in this old mill city since he left Dublin almost 15 years ago. His ability to raise $125 million (€84 million) to create a hub of three theatres is a mark of his standing, not just as a theatre director but as a public figure.

And yet, this morning, he is trying to explain how all of "this" seems almost accidental. For at this moment he is what he has not been for 21 years - a working actor coming down from the high of last night's performance. With a crackle of expectation and curiosity in the air, he had opened as Frank Hardy in a play with which his other life as a director will always be associated, Brian Friel's Faith Healer . It was an extraordinary act of exposure, returning not just to the stage but to an austere and demanding play in which he has to perform two lengthy monologues. Returning, too, to a ghost that has haunted Irish theatre for almost 30 years.

From the time he was six, Dowling recalls, he wanted to be an actor: "There was nothing else I wanted to do." He trained, in drama classes and then at the Abbey, with contemporaries such as Brenda Fricker and John Kavanagh. He began to make it when he was very young, joining the Abbey at 20 and quickly establishing himself as a leading actor under his mentor Tomás Mac Anna, who cast him in such memorable roles as Brecht in Günter Grass's The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising and Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown. Acting met a psychological need that, in retrospect, he can discern in his own personality.

Continue reading today's Irish Times column by O'Toole: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/1117/1224258977113.html

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