IRVING NOVEL BROUGHT TO LIFE FAITH-BASED THEATRE PRESENTS A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANEY
Irving tale serves up faith with absurdist comic twist Crackling dialogue and inspired performances throughout
John Irving’s 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany tells the story of how narrator John Wheelwright’s strange school friend Owen, a small boy with a squeaky voice, gave him the gift of Christian faith. Simon Bent’s theatrical adaptation of the novel seems an ideal fit for faith-based Pacific Theatre.
In the play, John narrates a series of flashbacks to the 1950s and ’60s, revealing Owen’s challenges to organized religion and growing certainty — as he sees visions of angels and his own death — that he’s “God’s instrument.”
But there’s a lot more to the play: An array of distinctive characters given wonderfully absurd life through Irving’s crackling dialogue and inspired performances from many of the 17 actors in Ian Farthing’s excellent Ensemble Theatre production.
The scintillating first act unfortunately gives way to a turgidly scripted second, sputtering and meandering to the exciting climax only to end in anticlimax. But what great fun while it lasts.
Chris Lam is superb as tiny, brilliant, precocious Owen, with his damaged larynx and ridiculously high voice, bullied by the other New Hampshire private school kids and hung on a peg in a closet by best friend John (Tariq Leslie).
Owen is in love with John’s mother (the delightful Alexis Kellum-Creer), but despised by his grandmother (the acidic Tanja Dixon-Warren). He hangs out at John’s house because his own parents are so weird.
Sitting beside an old radio, covered in granite dust that rains down on them from explosions at their quarry (credit Rick Colhoun’s fine sound design), Mrs. and Mr. Meany (Kim Steger and a dynamite Gabriel Carter) are a duo straight out of Beckett. “When you die,” he deadpans to her, “I’m getting a dog.”
The product of his mother’s one-night stand, John struggles to learn his father’s identity while the town’s religious conflicts rage.
When Owen intervenes in a debate between Congregationalist Reverend Merrill (David Wallace) and Episcopalian Rector Wiggins (James Gill), Wiggins tells him, “You’re right, son.”
Owen (calling him Rectum Wiggins) responds, “I know I’m right and I’m not your son.”
To Wiggins’ dogmatic remark that God moves in mysterious ways, John’s wheelchair-bound Aunt Lydia (the wonderfully sarcastic Lindsay Nelson) quickly retorts: “He should try moving in a wheelchair.”
As his radical Christianity evolves, Owen gets to act in two very funny local productions. Alysson Hall is hilarious as a schoolmate lobbying to be cast as Mary in the Nativity where Owen plays baby Jesus. And Paul Herbert shines in a cameo as over-the-top Scrooge to Owen’s ghost in A Christmas Carol.
There’s little comedy in Act 2 after Owen unwittingly causes an unfortunate death at a baseball game. Set in the 1960s during John F. Kennedy’s presidency and the Vietnam War, the act moves in fits and starts toward the sacrificial death that Owen has dreamed for himself.
That bravely theatrical scene cleverly utilizes an oversized chair and the basketball dunk that John and Owen have been practising. But the revelations that follow, John’s discovery of his father and his own faith, hardly seem worth the fuss.
Though an only partly successful adaptation with a somewhat muddled religious theme, there’s still a lot to like in this version of Owen’s world.