Strange powers: Jones, Fiennes, and McDiarmid photo: Nigel Parry Shining City By Conor McPherson Biltmore Theatre 261 West 47th Street Faith Healer By Brian Friel 222 West 45th Street 212-231-6200 See also: Complete Coverage of the 51st Annual Obies more theater most popular most commented The Unconquered by Alexis Soloski Rafta, Rafta . . . by Alexis Soloski Rattlestick Playwrights Theater by Michael Feingold Unsettled Sightlines by Michelle Orange John Turturro's Does Beckett Hamm I Am by Alexis Soloski Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Both Shakespeare and Williams, however, knew the difference between the serious part of the play and the supernatural junk they threw in to spook the groundlings. That's where McPherson goes wrong. His story describes a simple interaction between two men, a lapsed priest who's set up shop as a therapist (Brían F. O'Byrne), and a recently widowed restaurant-supply salesman (Oliver Platt) who thinks he's being haunted by his dead wife's ghost. As the therapy sessions go on, alternating with scenes from the therapist's tangled private life, we learn that the salesman's messy marriage offered ample reasons for his be-ghosting now, and that his bumbling novice healer comes well equipped with ghosts of his own. When the treatment's completed (rather summarily), the men go their separate ways, one comparatively healed and one not. That's a small story, but a plausible and interesting one, unlike the genre rehashes of earlier McPherson works like The Weir and The Good Thief. But then comes that ending, which either tells us something we already knew—the therapist has solved the patient's problems but not his own—or sneeringly lets us know that something more effectively done in an old-style three-page magazine story has been slipped in on us while we thought we were watching a play. (To make matters worse, there's even some flimflammery about an object, the transferred ownership of which may carry the supernatural with it. Haven't M.R. James and his imitators long since worked that one into its grave?)

McPherson may mean us to see the ghostly as an image of the hidden connections between human beings. All four of Shining City's characters are lonely, isolated, emotionally impaired people who don't notice or can't express their connection to others. But this too is old stuff, and his way of writing it, all hesitations and repetitions, grinds the point in rather than dramatizing it. He gets all the help he could ask: Robert Falls's staging, subtle and tactful, is his best work in some time. Few actors are better than Brían F. O'Byrne at delineating a disturbed personality: He catches the therapist's haunted past and bothersome present in every silent glance. Oliver Platt's monotone delivery always bothers me, but here he builds on it, cannily and in the long run movingly. Martha Plimpton and Peter Scanavino, with only one brief scene apiece, register powerfully. Yet even fine acting and direction can't make Shining City more than a pale ghost of a play.

Even paler, to my taste, is The Faith Healer, the 1979 play in which Brian Friel started this whole narrational mode of Celtic drama. Like Shining City, Faith Healer emphasizes the psychological while toying with the supernatural: The title character, a charming mythomane who half believes in his curative powers, works his way among the tiny villages of Scotland and Wales, dragging along his wife and his manager, both too smitten with him to chuck the shabby situation. Death, breakdown, and misery result, but not as we watch; the characters simply take turns narrating events for us. As a mode of playwriting, this has always struck me as pointless—why bother with all the theatrical paraphernalia if there's no dramatic event?—and I have to confess that The Faith Healer strikes me as pretty much pointless too. The hero knows something will go wrong, and it does. Everybody's unhappy. The end.

That the hero is the least interesting role doesn't improve matters, especially not as played, in Jonathan Kent's production, by Ralph Fiennes, who seems both too young and too coolly urbane for the character and, finding no action to play, tries to get by on vocal color alone, with numbingly dreary results. If Cherry Jones is this itinerant's wife, Memphis is north of Dublin, but at least Jones knows how to create and focus an emotion onstage. Ian McDiarmid gets all there is to be gotten, in humor and pathos, out of the seedy Cockney manager. But again, acting can't make up for the absence of a play. I know, I know, there's an Irish tradition of storytelling. But the whole charm of storytelling is that it can be done anywhere; it doesn't require the vast resources that make these fancied-up recitations masquerading as plays look so pretentious and vacant.