A Case For the Existence of God at BCT

Or: A Specific Kind of Sadness

For two men in such similar circumstances, Ryan (Jake Atkinson) and Keith (Ian Duff) could not be more different. Both are born and raised in Twin Falls, Idaho, both are new fathers, both are haunted by terrible fears, but you would not think that they could occupy the same room. Even the way they hold their cups marks them as being from vastly different lives. Atkinson’s solidity gives Ryan his own gravity; he’s sure-footed and stable (yet secretly roiling; magma beneath the earth). Duff’s Keith though, is made of energy. High-tension wires humming, precise and exact, but shaking in a tremor of the hand and the voice. Touch him and you’d sizzle.

What brings these two together is a plot of land overlooking the Snake River Canyon, that once belonged to Ryan’s family and that he wants to own again. To that end, following a daycare connection, he has sought out Keith, a local mortgage broker, to plunge into the murky and danger-filled waters of finance. So begins a complex and deep-seated friendship through the unending nightmare of living in a Samuel D. Hunter play (i.e. the real world, turned up to eleven).

Their world, seemingly full of solid things, is given a perilous diaphanousness; a sense that some great and terrible Thing (the fickle economy, the darker twists of the soul, or something even more unfathomably awful) will, at any moment, reach through and rend the screen, plucking one or both of the men from existence itself: eldritch horror meets hometown struggles. This exquisite dread is underscored by Drew Dalzell’s sound design (half-heard hums and subvocal growls) and the uneasy lighting design of Julien V. Elstob, who create the world out of shadows and keeps it flickering in the peripheries of our vision.

Duff and Atkinson so perfectly embody their respective characters that the crisis and comedy that sparks between them is endlessly surprising. There’s much to laugh at, the jokes lobbed underhand by both men with unstudied grace, and much to weep over too, delivered with the same devastating restraint. It’s a 90 minute play that feels like you’ve lived a hundred years. It is, in a word, harrowing, in the best possible way.

It is important to note, going into the play, that the title is one of Hunter’s more obscure ones. Don’t come in dreading (or hoping for) a rousing bout between faith and freedom that Hunter so often provides. In this case, the case for the existence of G-d is a subtler matter, found in the golden lines, heavy and ponderous, that glitter through the ordinary days of Keith and Ryan. The play, wound tight and slowly unspooling, takes us through moments, ordinary and profound, before leaving us, in the most unlikely of places, in the light of grace.