Ian McDiarmid's Teddy, the low-level manager of an alleged faith healer (Ralph Fiennes), is an extraordinary study of loneliness and despair despite his almost jolly veneer. Heavily drinking and garishly costumed, with dyed red hair standing on end like spikes, Teddy is also a web of contradictions. He insists his relationship with the faith healer and, by extension, the faith healer's wife (Cherry Jones), is "strictly business" when in fact it's deeply personal. Without them, Teddy has no life, no identity. Faith Healer is a series of monologues, something that makes McDiarmid's singular performance all the more extraordinary. With no other performers to act as buffers, he addresses the audience, powerfully rendering each moment.
While McDiarmid is best known for playing the coldly manipulative Palpatine in five of the Star Wars films, he has an extraordinary body of theatre, film, and television credits under his belt, having essayed lead roles in the West End, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and at the National Theatre and the Royal Court. Faith Healer marks McDiarmid's Broadway debut.
For this role, McDiarmid received a Theatre World Award and was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play.
Tall and gawky (he dwarfs everyone else onstage), Pablo Schreiber's physical appearance underscores the profound sense of separateness that his character, Ralph Berger, feels toward those around him in Lincoln Center Theater's revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! Schreiber also captures Ralph's hopelessness at his go-nowhere job and, more seriously, his family's total indifference to his plight. Still, even as he is at odds with a world that worships the dollar bill, Ralph is not a man in decay. His anger fosters action, and one imagines he will escape his family and thrive elsewhere, unlike the others in the Berger clan.
Prior to making his Broadway debut in Awake and Sing!, Schreiber appeared in a number of Off-Broadway productions, including Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade (Roundabout Theatre Company) and Paul Grellong's Manuscript (Daryl Roth Theatre), playing various characters. In Mr. Marmalade, he was a self-destructive 5-year-old; in Manuscript, a Harvard freshman. Among his film credits: The Lords of Dogtown and The Manchurian Candidate. On TV, he has been seen on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and The Wire.
The cast of Awake and Sing! received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble.
As Moe Axelrod in Awake and Sing!, Mark Ruffalo embodies disillusionment as a cynical war veteran whose misery is compounded by his unrequited love for the married Hennie Berger (Lauren Ambrose). A boarder in the tormented Berger home, Axelrod is the classic sensitive thug who is witness to everyone else's unhappines; he's also an entrapped participant. The most striking scenes are Moe's sexually charged and enraged encounters with Hennie.
Ruffalo, who is making his Broadway debut with this production, is a critically acclaimed and widely respected actor whose Off-Broadway performances have long been earning him recognition. In Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth, he earned Lucille Lortel and Theatre World awards for his portrayal of an overindulged, self-abusing, rootless young man. In James Lapine's The Moment When, Ruffalo was praised for his interpretation of a roguish young professional forced to change his ways when he unexpectedly becomes a father and is ill equipped to deal with his new role. Ruffalo's films include You Can Count on Me, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Collateral, Just Like Heaven, and the upcoming remake of All the King's Men.
For this role, Ruffalo was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. The cast of Awake and Sing! received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble.
As Posner, the vulnerable youth in The History Boys, Samuel Barnett, in his Broadway debut, fully inhabits the role of a sharp-witted gay student in love with a cocky classmate, Dakin (Dominic Cooper). Even in Posner's campiest moments, punctuated with bursts of song that are melodic and tuneful, Barnett is totally plausible. Beneath the comedy he is a poignant figure, hinting at a troubled past and an unhappy future.
Barnett studied at the London Academy for Music and Dramatic Art. His professional stage credits include appearances at the Royal Exchange in Manchester (The Marriage of Figaro) and in London at the Olivier Theatre (His Dark Materials), the Open Air Theatre (Frankenstein), and the Bush (When You Cure Me). He also appeared in The History Boys at the National Theatre, earning a nomination for an Olivier Award. In addition, he has frequently worked on British television.
For this role, Barnett received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play.
In the grotesquely bloody Grand Guignol comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Domhnall Gleeson captures to perfection the role of Davey, a pony-tailed teenage comic thug with a stunningly low I.Q. Gleeson's acting is especially vivid when Davey desperately attempts to apply shoe polish to a tabby in order to make it look like the dead black cat that serves as the catalyst for the play.
Moping about yet occasionally sniffing the polish, Davey is terrified that he will be held culpable for the cat's death—for it belongs to a sadistic terrorist—and he fears even more the brutal consequences he will face should his absurd efforts at deception come to naught. But then, what is Davey but an absurd, vain little man clearly in love with his flowing tresses? As Gleeson plays him, he is numbing stupidity coupled with equally numbing self-admiration—a memorable combination.
In the U.K. Gleeson has performed in a wide variety of theatres, including the Garrick in the West End (where The Lieutenant of Inishmore ran), the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the Liverpool Playhouse.
This is Gleeson's first Tony nomination.
—Simi Horwitz