The Faith Healers

Faith Healer, The (1910), a play by William Vaughn Moody. [Savoy Theatre, 13 perf.] Ulrich Michaelis (Henry Miller), a faith healer in the Middle West, comes to the farm of the skeptical Matthew Beeler (Harold Russell) and makes Beeler's wife, Mary (Mable Bert), walk for the first time in many years. Mary urges Ulrich to go out in the world and heal others, but he is reluctant to leave the area since he loves Mary's niece Rhoda Williams (Jessie Bonstelle). Ulrich's ministrations are opposed by the local physician Dr. Littlefield (Theodore Friebus) and by the Reverend John Culpepper (Edward See), who suspects the occult. When Rhoda admits to Ulrich that Littlefield has been her lover, Ulrich's self‐confidence wanes, and with it his faith‐healing abilities. On Easter morning he determines to fight back and to love Rhoda despite her history. As his gifts return he tells Rhoda, “You needed what the whole world needs—healing, healing, and as I rose to meet that need, the power that I had lost poured back into my soul.” Producer Henry Miller, who had so successfully presented and starred in The Great Divide, mounted the play out of a sense of obligation to the dying Moody, knowing it would almost certainly fail. Contemporary critics dismissed the work as closet drama, but Quinn called it “the most significant of Moody's dramas because the theme is the largest and the treatment most secure . . . it had a deeper imaginative quality than The Great Divide.”

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