by Richard Lord

Back in the days when I was teaching playwriting to high schoolers and middle schoolers, there was one valuable piece of advice I would always offer my students. It was advice that I had learned from my own experiencing writing plays, and it was valuable to these students because as they started their plays, they would have just two characters. My advice was this: at some point, you’ll find you’ve reached an impasse, or the scene is becoming repetitive. You start to go over a problem again that you’ve already dealt with. The scene becomes sluggish. When you hit that danger point, I would tell my students, go back a little bit in the action and introduce a third character.

That third character, I said, becomes an important catalyst. She or he will change the dynamic, perhaps get the action or the tension going in another direction or take it to another level. That third character also necessitates a new dynamic in the relationships, making this important of a play fresh again.

I contended that even in a short play (most of my students at that level were writing short plays), this strategy should be adopted. I then asserted that it takes a talented writer to make a two-hander that doesn’t fall into sluggishness. More, it takes a very talented writer to turn out a full-length play with just two characters that doesn’t fall prey to all the hazards I mentioned.

I would now tell any students that if they wanted to see an exception to my precept, a full-length with just two characters that is quite successful, they should read or see Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case For The Existence of God. Those of us in the Philadelphia area are fortunate in that we can now catch a first-rate production of this play at South Philly’s Theatre Exile.  

The scene is Twin Falls, Idaho. (Playwright Hunter, an Idaho native, has set all his plays in the Gem State.)  Ryan and Keith know each other from the day care center where both have daughters on the verge of toddlerhood attending. Keith is a mortgage broker, which is just what Ryan needs, as there’s a promising piece of property he is determined to acquire. The property is a large lot that was once owned by his family, though it passed out of his family’s hands 80 years earlier. In other words, it has a much deeper significance for him that just a vague property to purchase. Ryan plans to regain the land, build a house on the lot, in pretty much the same place his forebears once had their house. This will provide Ryan and his daughter a good place to call home.

Ryan soon discovers that even with a seemingly steady job and the support of Keith, securing a mortgage is not at all an easy proposition. He needs Keith, and as the play’s dynamic develops, Keith soon learns that he also needs Ryan in an important way. As Ryan points out, the two “share a sadness”

For the rest of the play, we witness our two characters bonding, unbonding and rebonding. The major channel for their bonding is their two daughters and the problems they both have in maintaining a steady paternal relationship with those daughters. Ryan’s problem is that he’s in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, while Keith is a single foster father hoping to adopt who also happens to be an uncloseted gay Black man in a part of the country not known for being particularly sympathetic to either of those demographics.  

The play then becomes an extended look at the problems the trials of fatherhood in today’s world, a world paved with uncertainties. Both of these men are tottering on tightropes, hoping to make their way safely to their goals. They try to convince themselves their situation is not so emotionally precarious, but at the back of their minds, they’re quite insecure about their situation. Moreover, they’re not even sure that the tightropes are taking them to their goals. Worse, they come to understand that the tightropes that they’re making their way along can suddenly be tugged, by maybe … an addict in the north of Idaho or faceless figures at some bank who get their instructions from heartless algorithms crunching raw financial statistics.

This is what keeps us engaged over the roughly 90 minutes of A Case For The Existence of God. Most of the scenes are set in the same location: Keith’s office at the mortgage brokerage, but it’s the changes and the tensions going on within the characters that drive the action. Without ever thumping on these themes, Samuel Hunter shows us convincingly just how callous and vindictive the financial system in America can be and how blind in one eye (and half-blind in the other) the legal system can be.

Hunter himself views the play as “… a tiny drama with the grandest possible title, a tiny moment in an impossibly grand world.” As Ryan says at a key moment in the play, “We have to believe that things still make sense.” Delivered from a place of repeatedly battered hope, that one line captures why an audience connects with these characters: we, too, want to believe that things still make sense somehow, so we very much wish to see things make sense to these two fellows in that “impossibly grand world” the playwright has cast them in.

Even with the challenges of a full-length two-hander, Samuel D. Hunter’s script succeeds because he’s able to create these well-drawn, sympathetic characters who engage us all the way through. He also, it’s good to note, slips in laugh lines at just the right places. These lines that draw laughs are never forced or extraneous: the humorous bits are organically grown from the situation in a particular scene or an echo from an earlier scene.  

The Theatre Exile production of this play succeeds because of two very strong performances, with Keith Conallen as Ryan and Isaiah Caleb Stanley as Keith.

Conallen skillfully balances his character’s fierce pride and his vulnerability to give us a Ryan who sees that promised reward at the end of the rainbow receding ever farther from his reach. Even in this character’s most irritable moments, when he becomes most irritating to Keith, Conallen’s Ryan remains sympathetic. We want things to work out for this Ryan, despite all the traps playwright Hunter has set in his path.  

Keith seems to be the much more grounded, more secure character in the early scenes. However, as his dream of uninterrupted parenthood starts to crumble, we see his vulnerability and how much loss drills into his fragile soul. It’s a difficult role, and Isaiah Caleb Stanley plays it masterfully. Stanley’s Keith is the anchor of the guy relationship until the anchor cracks and sinks.

Most important, the way these two actors interact is key to the success of this production. For that aspect of the performance, it would seem only fitting to give much credit to director Matt Pfeiffer. This is not an easy play to direct, to find a strategy that takes us from the opening scene through some emotionally harrowing moments up to the surprise ending. Matt Pfeiffer has come up with a compelling strategy here.

And now I get a chance to work in my few quibbles. First, the breaks between scenes aren’t really that effective. The lights go down, we hear music or other sounds, then the lights spark up again, and we’re in the exact same place but days or weeks later. We know that the scene has changed, but the change was not fitting for a first-rate production such as this.  

I’m not sure what role lighting designer Thom Weaver in this scene-change decision, but his set earns a nod of appreciation, and he lights that set nicely.

I’ve saved one quibble from my ration of quibbles for the playwright. Despite the title, God is not mentioned even once in the play. I concede that in a rather oblique way, the title can be said to sum up what has transpired on the stage. But it is quite a stretch to make that point. I would definitely argue that Samuel D. Hunter should have should have thought longer and harder to come up with a more appropriate title. In this case, what was “the grandest” (Hunter’ description) was clearly not the best.

Now that I got in my quibbles, let say that I soundly recommend this show for all those interested in thoughtful, emotionally engaging theatre that takes a sympathetic look at how the world works for those who’ve been felled in their pursuit of happiness.

A Case For The Existence of God runs at Theatre Exile, 1340 South 13th Street (corner of Reed Street), Philadelphia through Sunday, January 21. The Wednesday and Thursday performances are at 7:00 p.m., with an additional Thursday show on Jan. 18 at 12:00 p.m. Friday and Saturday performances are at 8:00 p.m.; Sunday at 3:00 p.m.

The Trivia Trail
Though it never gets mentioned which yogurt plant Ryan works for, there is a very likely candidate. In 2012, Chobani opened the world’s largest yogurt manufacturing plant in Twin Falls.

Keith and Ryan were at high school together. That school was most likely Twin Falls High. One of the most notable alumni of this school was Mark Felt, better known as Deep Throat of Watergate Scandal fame.