Theatre in Review: Grace (Cort Theatre)

	Kate Arrington, Michael Shannon, Ed Asner, Paul Rudd. Photo: Joan Marcus

If Grace does nothing else, it reminds us that, to make theatrical magic, all you need is Michael Shannon and a telephone. Two seasons ago, in Craig Wright's uproarious Mistakes Were Made, he remained glued to the phone, turning the travails of a desperate, trouble-prone theatre producer into solid-gold hilarity. In Grace, also by Wright, Shannon mines laughter from that modern scourge known as the computer answering system. Here, he is an odd, reclusive figure whose photo-editing program has erased all of his images; he calls for help and his attempts at navigating the maze of pointless questions and useless instructions provoke plenty of knowing laughter. (I especially treasure the way he barks "Representative!" with increasing fury, trying, without success, to cut through the automatic chatter.) Shannon is best known for his rogue's gallery of sinister characters, but he has first-rate timing, too, and it's always a pleasure to see him exercise his comedic muscles.

This scene works so well because of its specificity and because it touches on a frustration that is well known to everyone in the audience. If the rest of Grace suffers in comparison, it's because Wright's ambitions have run away with him. Grace wants to be about nothing less than the role of Christianity in modern American life, summed up in 90 minutes. If this sounds like a tall order, it certainly doesn't help that the author's theme is imposed on a notably rickety plot and cast of characters.

Steve and Sara, a young married couple, have arrived somewhere at the Florida shore on a mission from God. Steve, who specializes in renovating hotels, wants to open a chain of Gospel-themed inns. Each will come complete with a sanctuary and baptismal pool, among other amenities. (The proposed slogan: "Where would Jesus stay?") His company, "Sonrise Hotels," is desperately in need of cash, and he is eagerly awaiting $9 million to be wired to his account, courtesy of a mysterious German millionaire. (One of Grace's most amusing aspects, however unintentional, is how Steve's financial arrangements mirror the details of the financing scandal that aborted the planned Broadway musical of Rebecca.) Waiting for the money to arrive, Steve and Sara raise their arms in prayer, conspicuously count their blessings, and generally behave as if everything is super-perfect. There are distress signals, however: There's a faint note of hysteria that creeps into Steve's voice when, smiling brightly, he ever-so-carefully bullies Sara into agreement. There's also the way that, whenever Sara brings up the topic of children, Steve swiftly changes the subject. And there's the terrible itching that afflicts Steve like one of the plagues of Egypt.

With no children and no friends, Sara is quietly going stir-crazy, so she tries to befriend her reclusive next-door neighbor. He is Sam, a NASA scientist who is still recovering from the freak car accident that killed his girlfriend and left half of his face a mass of scars. (He wears a kind of transparent plastic guard over his now-healed wounds; it makes him look rather like the Phantom of the Opera.) Sara sweeps past the emotional wall Sam has erected to keep people out and, before long, they are spending their days together. He even toys with the idea of investing in Steve's hotel scheme.

If you can't see trouble brewing in the last two paragraphs, you haven't been paying attention; in any case, a set of business reversals for Steve combines with Sam and Sara's growing involvement to create a toxic atmosphere in which the worst could, and does, happen. Before that final calamity, which is telegraphed in a brutal opening scene that, interestingly, reels backward, Wright provides us with a number of telling moments. A scene in which Steve, using his best I'm-only-asking-out-of-curiosity manner, tries to convert Sam is a letter-perfect portrayal of religious salesmanship. (It fails in part because he is too eager to close the deal.) Sam's response to an old man's account of a horrible episode in Nazi Germany ("You don't see God's grace in that story?") is an all-too-accurate depiction of the tin-eared triumphalism that sometimes afflicts those who proselytize. Altogether, Wright is at his best when showing how, in America, a literal-minded approach to the gospels has merged with our native belief in opportunity and the endless possibilities of self-invention, creating a religion that is more about self-help than salvation. As Steve says, "I'm not a knower, I'm a believer. And that's what the real estate market is all about!"

If Wright had fleshed out his characters more and let his story unfold at a more leisurely pace, Grace might really have been a potent cocktail of satire and sorrow. As it is, its coincidence-riddled narrative is further undermined by a series of rapid-fire character reversals designed to underline the already obvious fact that Steve and Sara's faith is built on a foundation of quicksand. Steve's hotel scheme is all too clearly doomed to failure. Sara throws off her marital vows without even a slight pang of conscience. Both Steve and Sam undergo similarly unbelievable changes of heart. Everyone is much too willing to tell his or her life story, at the drop of a hat. Ed Asner appears twice as an elderly German exterminator largely to introduce further hard-to-swallow plot developments, especially an eleventh-hour revelation, about a chance encounter with a figure from his past, that beggars belief. Furthermore, Steve and Sara's faith is treated in thoroughly generic fashion; without a sense of which branch of Christianity claims them, it's hard to fully understand the role religion plays in their lives.

That Grace remains watchable throughout is thanks to the efforts of its expert cast, under the fine handling of Dexter Bullard. In addition to Shannon, whose finely honed portrayal of an embittered survivor is loaded with unexpected shadings, Paul Rudd is superb as Steve, whose glassy-eyed belief in God and success as equal partners is bound to lead to a profound disillusionment. (He is particularly enjoyable when explaining what he calls "the seed-harvest paradigm," which justifies his tragically naïve belief that wealth is just around the corner.) Kate Arrington's Sara is touching in her need for affection and a sense of purpose; her growing attachment to Sam is sketched in carefully and in finer detail than anything else the script has to offer. Cast as an aging deus ex machina, Asner does the best possible job with his patchy material.

Bullard has also done good work with his design team. The play unfolds in adjoining, and identical, furnished condominiums, rendered, in Beowulf Boritt's ingenious set design, as a single, sparely furnished, room with no walls, placed on a turntable, which shifts its angle from time to time, indicating that the action has moved from one location to the other. We see Steve, Sara, and Sam in the same room and understand that they are in fact occupying separate spaces. It's a clever and economical solution to a difficult staging problem; a backdrop, depicting constantly changing skies, adds a sense of the larger universe that preoccupies Wright's characters so much. David Weiner's lighting, Tif Bullard's costumes, and Darron L. West's sound are also perfectly fine.

Still, the one thing lacking in Grace is a sense of belief. Wright's contrived, overly fast-paced narrative treats religious faith as a viral phenomenon, passed from person to person by human contact, when it is more often something that is slow, mysterious, and interior. If playwrights are like God, filling little worlds with their creations, Wright has populated his with puppets.--David Barbour