Arden's 'Prayer For Owen Meany'

That difficult transition
from novel to stage

LEWIS WHITTINGTON

In 2002 the British playwright Simon Bent adapted John Irving‘s beloved second-coming fable, The Prayer for Owen Meany, for The National Theater and enjoyed a sellout run. Bent’s reputation, as well as Irving’s standing as an elegiac American storyteller, endows this play with an instant pedigree. But Irving’s characters live more dimensionally in his prose than they do in the flesh onstage in Bent‘s ambitious but rocky play.

When we first meet Owen he is being teased by his classmates because of his tiny stature and shrill voice. His best friend John narrates their story of growing up in a dreary industrial town in New Hampshire of the ’50s. It is less a world of 5’0s prosperity and more an outpost of despair with only window dressings of hope and faith. Owen, proclaiming himself an instrument of God’s will, holds to his inner faith even as he mocks and rejects his community’s competing organized religions.

The townspeople are shocked when Owen’s batted baseball accidentally kills John’s mother. Flash-forward to the boys in a religious prep school, where Owen continues his journey as God’s instrument. Fifties social order gives way to ‘60s upheaval as America’s moral compass unravels over the Vietnam War.

Irving’s allegories, which evolved quietly in his novel, come across as heavy-handed on stage. Bent constructs a well paced, flowing second act, in which the characters’ emotions, motives and inner lives bloom. But Acts I and III suffer from unbalanced, unfocused even choppy scenes with convoluted exposition. After Owen joins the army he becomes cynical, but his manifestation of the change— a hostile standup comedy routine— doesn’t work within the play’s context.

Director Terrence J. Nolen is obviously adept in streamlining scenes, as evidenced in his revivals of such musical thickets as Sweeney Todd and especially Pacific Overtures. But he could have used a sharper edge here with some scene compression or more invention blocking. Having the actors recite dialogue standing still in a line in front of the audience was ironic the first time but thereafter played like a distracting stagy devise.

The simple, bold production design, which quietly evokes the ‘50s tableaux of Irving’s religiosity vis-à-vis the doomed American dream, packs a terrific ethereal quality. The 17-person cast is uneven, some members carving out characters and others caricatures. Anthony Lawton gives Owen’s father a tragic drollness and Mary Mantello seduces us John’s salt of the earth Grandmother.

Doug Hara as Owen Meany is resourceful throughout, conveying the character’s maturation (without physically growing up) and carrying the thread of Owen’s moral innocence with poetic clarity. Ian Merrill Peakes is equally dimensional as John. Together they overcome the production’s deficiencies and deliver the power of Irving’s metaphors intact.