Phillyist Reviews: A Prayer for Owen Meany

It's been nearly a week since I went to see the Arden's production of A Prayer for Owen Meany. And yet I haven't reviewed it until just now. This is for a couple of reasons: (1) I've been insanely busy; (2) I left the program at a friend's, and still don't have it back, so I can't cite actors by name, and would have liked to, so I was hoping that I'd get that program back before I wrote this (but I just found the cast list on the Arden's website, so we're all good); (3) I may have forgotten a little; (4) something happened during the second intermission that made me so angry that I wanted to calm down to prevent this from becoming a sequel to last week's Monday Manners. So let me just say, very quickly, that if you want to leave a play at intermission because you're not enjoying it, that's fine. But if you're going to stand in the aisle, loudly trying to persuade your friends that the play sucks and that they should skip the end and go drinking with you, it's not.

There. Now I feel better. On to the play...

I must confess to not having read A Prayer for Owen Meany. I'd heard of it, had a general idea of what it was about, but that was it. Fortunately, the fact that I wasn't familiar with John Irving's book didn't stand in the way of my enjoyment of the play, which is really excellently cast and acted.

If you're not familiar with the plot, Owen Meany is all about the friendship between the title character (excellently played by Doug Hara) and John Wheelwright (the equally excellent Ian Merrill Peakes). Owen is small, with a distinct, and distinctly grating, tone to his voice. (The program contains an interview with Hara about trying to capture Owen's voice, which Irving had described but nobody had ever really heard.) Owen also thinks he's an instrument of God. So when a fly ball that he hits at a little league game hits and kills John's mother (Karen Peakes, who did a great job playing stage mother to her real-life husband), he is remorseful, but unapologetic. The play is a little about friendship, but it's also about death, and war.

The war thing was the one part that I found problematic. At some point in the third act, Owen, in full military regalia, delivers what is obviously meant to be a failed stand-up routine: a soliloquy on the screwed-upness that was Vietnam. It felt just a little too current, a little too editorial. It broke the fourth wall. It stuck out. It was awkward. That may be because it's one of the only moments in the play that John wasn't onstage, narrating the story. And I think it made the ending (which I won't give away, in case you haven't read the book) just a little less powerful.

Stellar performances by the whole cast, especially the three actors I'd already mentioned, along with Mary Martello, Anthony Lawton (in multiple roles), and Maureen Torsney-Weir (who had to perform sitting on her knees in a wheelchair). Terry Nolan's staging might be a little abstract for theatre traditionalists, but I really loved it (possibly my middle-school involvement in readers' theatre?). The set design, by Christopher Pickart, was beautiful and versatile—and, on at least two occasions, quite surprising.

I always count on the Arden to put on technically perfect, well acted and directed theatre, and while this didn't fit into the "kind of play" I'd grown to expect from the Arden (of course, my most recent experience there was Forum), it really was an Arden show. And it's worth attending before it closes on October 15.

A Prayer for Owen Meany
Through October 15 at the Arden Theatre
Tickets available online