God's Spies

A new play by Bill Cain

Or: What Is Essential

It’s been much remarked, to the point of hateful absurdity, that Shakespeare wrote Lear in quarantine. If you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps and write the thorny crown of world literature well you’re neither use nor ornament. But what did take to write that desolation in the midst of death, anarchy, and loss?

Bill Cain, playwright and jesuit, brought us Equivocation in 2009, a study on politics, immortality, faith and the Iraq war. We get one throwaway line as Shag leads his company through the blasted heath (“If we can get through his ‘comedies don’t have to be funny’ phase, we can get through this.”) Now we are back in a companion, not quite Prequel, written by Cain in the aftermath of Coronavirus pandemic, in one of those storied moments its first draft penned between the January 6th insurrection and the January 20th inauguration. It feeds and reflects the terrors, the absurdity, the boredom of life under lockdown, not too on the nose, but splendidly self aware. “London wouldn’t be London without the theaters,” Shax (his handwriting is still terrible) exclaims, “We’re, what’s the word? Essential!”

Unfortunately for Shax (Patrick J. Adams) he finds himself accidentally quarantined with his borrowed scribe Edger (Sathya Sridharan) an overly pious scot and the working girl, Ruth (Troian Bellisario), he was about relax his piety for. Trapped inside with this pair of strangers, he also has to confront that he’s a tapped out playwright, arms full of accolades and head empty of ideas, his Hamlet behind him and nothing but Timon of Athens ahead. But Ruth challenges him to find another Hamlet in his work, and the three of them hatch upon an old idea, one of a king and his three daughters…

The dialog is like the best meal you can imagine; it peels from its bones and slides into us delectably, warm on the tongue and warm on the belly. It’s jokes flit on swallows wings and (for those concerned by a jesuit at the helm) the play is irreverently philosophical, more interested in finding life than life-eternal (plus it’s gay. Can I interest anyone in bisexual Shakespeare?) Edger’s flowering out of the nut a whingy scrub is finally nuanced and sweet, and the discussions of what make a play, and a shakespeare play at that, work are the words you’ve been searching for out past the edge of your tongue your entire life.

Sridharan, gamely hefting the caber of a scots dialect and running full tilt, sweeps us through Edger’s rebirth, his learning of camaraderie, his first touches with love, with an energetic, yearning earnestness, and wry self acknowledgment, (“Ah have a tendency t’ ahbey auhthoritarian perr’sonalities,” he says abashedly). The scene where he impersonates an entire London street, too, is a divine bit of comedy. Adams sits perfectly on the self-involved, morally ambiguous wit, used to coasting through his relationships, finding himself truly in need of and caring for people for the first time. But as fine as their performances are, and as tenderly as Cain treats them, this is Ruth’s play.

Treated at first as a fallen woman by the conflicted Edger and as a potential audience member (and fallen woman) by Shax, Ruth is what both have needed all a long, for the first someone to drum the Jesus out of him and put his eyes on the earth, and the other the perfect critic and writing partner. Ruth’s station is in the upper tears of the globe, and has watched the plays over and over again while distracting herself from the attentions of her customers. She understands Shax’s strengths and weaknesses and what makes a good play, and offers to help him with his nascent tragedy on one condition, that he lets Cordelia survive.

Bellisario brings a low light intestines that radiates through the screen, that transforms itself into various pranks, picks, musings and wagers. Her Ruth is compressed by her trauma, but not squashed by it. Her performance burns with blue-hot heat. She is both the root and and the engine of the evening, indomitable. (And quick on her feet, after the reading Bellisario confessed to finding one of her script plages blank, a horrific expanse of whiteness, in one of the most intense scenes of the play, reaching out to smack her costar through the screen, she riffed off the beats she could remember, and hardly anyone could tell the difference.)

There may have been points in this era of zoom theater where I’ve been moved to exclaim at the screen but I think this is the first time I’ve yelled, “NOOOOO”, in tenterhooked horror of the moment (and I did it twice.) God’s Spies captures the feeling of the pandemic, the timelessness of Lear, the heart of people that lies beyond time and circumstance and ignorance, and shows us that you don’t have to write a masterpiece but it behoves you to reach out and see your fellow creatures as yourself.