It would be reassuring if people with great talent were also great humanitarians. But one of the perversities of human nature is that there's often no correlation. That's certainly true of the title character in Brian Friel's Faith Healer.

Francis Hardy may possess the mysterious gift of being able to cure the sick (at least some of the time), but his own soul is ailing. A liar and womanizer, he's also a heavy drinker, desperately trying to drown the doubts that plague his existence.

Indeed, Frank has so many unpleasant traits that Friel - widely recognized as Ireland's foremost living playwright - includes two other characters to help us understand what others see in this self-absorbed individual, whose particular talent is intended as a metaphor for art.

Whether he comes across as charismatic or possessed or just a slimy con artist, the actor who plays Frank has to hold some attraction for an audience. But in director Kasi Campbell's otherwise admirable production at Rep Stage in Columbia, Nigel Reed's Frank is so ordinary, he's practically a cipher.

Frank says he suffers from "nagging, tormenting, maddening questions that rotted my life," but Reed seems so easy-going, he's almost cheerful. And though the tale he tells grows increasingly dark, Reed is the only one of the production's three actors who fails to register any noticeable changes. It's far too literal an interpretation of the lyric "never, never change" from "The Way You Look Tonight," the record that always accompanied his "performances."

Friel structured this 1979 play as a series of Rashomon-style monologues, in which each character offers a different angle - and often different "facts" - relating to the same events. It's a format well-suited to the grand tradition of Irish storytelling, but it's not inherently dramatic since we never see the characters interacting. As a result, the play places extraordinary demands on the actors to produce compelling performances.

Director Campbell gets those performances from Julie-Ann Elliot, who delivers an anguished portrayal of Frank's devoted wife, Grace, a woman for whom "long-suffering" would be too understated and cliched a term, and from Bruce Nelson, who gloriously supplies much-needed comic relief as Frank's longtime Cockney manager. Nelson is absorbing to watch whether he's imitating the bagpipe-playing whippet who was one of his most successful acts before Frank, or trying to disguise the unrequited love he feels for Grace. Nelson is also the only member of the cast with a consistent accent.

In the end, Friel's play is less about one man's inexplicable gift than it is about the toll that gift takes. Its impact on those around the faith healer is ably demonstrated at Rep Stage, but the lackluster lead performance makes the man himself even more of a mystery than Friel may have imagined.

Theater

What: Faith Healer

Where: Rep Stage, Howard Community College, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays; matinees at 2:30 p.m. Sundays and most Saturdays. Through Nov. 24.

Tickets: $15-$22

Call: 410-772-4900