Looking at current news headlines, one would struggle to find a scintilla of evidence to make a case for the existence of God. The extant American realities are visibly ugly and demoralizing but we also can hope that in countless inconspicuous spaces, there is still fertile ground for human connection, decency, conscience and spiritual intelligence.
In Samuel D. Hunter’s masterly two-hander A Case for the Existence of God, set in Twin Falls, Idaho, the characters of Keith (Jon Hudson Odom) and Ryan (Lee Osorio) are desperate and unsatisfied. Yet, they connect via a nexus that reminds us that the best essence of humanity still consists of empathy, hope and divinity that transcends any conventional or restrictive definition of faith, confession and devotion.
It already has been a season of many superlative notes for Pioneer Theatre Company (PTC) but the Utah premiere of Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God, directed by Timothy Douglas, is at the top of an elite list of the company’s outstanding productions over the last decade. Actors Odom and Osorio deliver among the finest performances this critic has seen this season on any theatrical stage in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area.
Staged in the magnificent Meldrum Theatre at The University of Utah, which magnifies the intimate punch in outstanding chamber theater scripts such as the one Hunter has delivered, the play gives the audience a clear view of the magic that comes with actors who use their body language and movement to bring home the extraordinary emotional depth embedded in the lines they are speaking.
So much character detail and background are conveyed and made comprehensible for our benefit as viewers. Odom fully fleshes out the character portrait of Keith, a Black gay man who earned a fine arts degree in early music and likely once hoped that he would never have to return to his native city of Twin Falls. Instead, he is a mortgage broker, is a single father to a daughter he adores and is uncomfortable and awkward about living again in Idaho. Odom pulls his body inward so that his physical space is as tight and dense as possible. Keith’s defensive posture is always on alert about protecting himself. His anxieties are so pronounced that a panic attack alway seems just seconds away in happening.
Likewise, Osorio anchors Ryan with equally impressive nuanced contours. Ryan is not college educated, he works at a plant where yogurt is made, and is a divorced father who worries about losing custody of his daughter. Ryan is counting on Keith’s financial savviness to cobble together a financing package that will allow him to buy 12 acres of land that once belonged to an earlier generation in his family. Ryan’s rugged masculine exterior is a shield that barely covers his underlying lack of confidence, desperation and fear of forever losing the grip on his dream of making a stable middle-class life where he can provide for his daughter. Divorce and mental illness are unfortunate parts of his family history.
Modulating the rhythms of their dialogue in beautiful chemistry, both actors are brilliant in pauses and rests that allow us to absorb the full complex of emotional tensions and extract the thematic imperative of every scene in the play. At the outset, because of so many sharp contrasts in their lives, one might wonder if these apparent strangers will ever be able to communicate and bond without uncertainty, discomfort or awkwardness. However, as they realize the major parallels they share — the fact that their daughters go to the same daycare center or when Keith reminds Ryan that they attended the same high school at the same time — a male friendship emerges tentatively at first and then builds gradually, but not without its hiccups or tensions.
Akin to the legendary playwright Horton Foote, the quintessential voice of the South, Hunter, an award-winning playwright, eminently reiterates his own place in the American theatrical canon. A native Idahoan, Hunter lifts the banal, quotidian setting of a Twin Falls mortgage brokerage office into a place that belongs in the quilt of the American experience. Hunter consistently creates characters and stories that resonate with the realities of many ordinary middle-class Americans who regularly face just as monumental and extraordinary situations and circumstances that equal (and often exceed) those of the fabled upper class elite in the big cities on both coasts.
In 2021, just as millions of people were emerging from pandemic-related isolation, the Survey Center on American Life tracked the decline of close friendships among Americans: “Thirty years ago, a majority of men (55 percent) reported having at least six close friends. Today, that number has been cut in half. Slightly more than one in four (27 percent) men have six or more close friends today. Fifteen percent of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990. … Only 22 percent of young men lean on their friends in tough times. Thirty-six percent say their first call is to their parents.”
The results are not an outlier. A 2020 study revealed that one in five Americans reported having no close social connections and 28% of men under the age of 30 reported having no close social connections. An Associated Press survey found that 18% of the public had no more than one person outside their immediate household they could turn to should they need help.
This superb PTC production of a play that had its world premiere in 2022 resonates with a profound understanding of this contemporary American mindset and challenge. The play’s metaphysical epilogue puts the illuminating touch on its display of grace. Even when beleaguered by a sense of hopelessness that seems bent on never releasing its grip, two people become courageous enough, even if begrudgingly at first, to find a small but safe harbor in a genuine friendship that leaves behind masculine norms and restrictions on psychic intimacy.
Performances continue through April 12. For tickets and more information, see the Pioneer Theatre Company website.