Los Angeles Times

October 13, 2006

THEATER BEAT

Taking on a tangled issue with 'Grace'

Craig Wright's "Grace" delivers refreshing — though far from reassuring — complexity.

Questions of faith and science tend to polarize around predictable rhetoric, but Craig Wright's "Grace" brings refreshing — though far from reassuring — complexity to what is fast becoming the most urgent philosophical issue of our time.

A former Methodist seminarian turned writer for stage ("Recent Tragic Events") and TV ("Six Feet Under"), Wright spins rigorous theological inquiry with an accomplished dramatist's flair. Edgy, raucous and uncompromising, his dark examination of fundamentalist Christians adrift in suburban Florida receives a sharp staging from the Furious Theatre Company.

A deceptively conventional love triangle, whose tragic outcome we witness at the outset, drives the story of Steve (Brad Price) and Sara (Sara Hennessy), a devout Minnesota couple newly arrived in the Sunshine State to develop a chain of Gospel-themed "Sonrise" motels with the catchy slogan: "Where would Jesus stay?"

Uptight and inflexible in his belief system, Steve pursues this dream with a painfully naive lack of reality testing where his funding is concerned. The lonely Sara makes a reclamation project out of their neighbor, Sam (Eric Pargac), an agnostic engineer embittered by a car crash that killed his fiancée and left him disfigured. Dana Kelly Jr. delivers a memorable supporting turn as a cynical pest exterminator.

The inevitable romantic betrayal comes as no surprise, but the ways these characters wrestle with it aches with unexpected and unsettling spiritual anguish. How can Sara's noble ideal that "we're here for each other, not just here beside each other" be reconciled with the inescapable clash of individual needs born of that interconnectedness?

With admirable clarity, director Dámaso Rodriguez steers his skilled cast through Wright's dense ruminations, with notable fuel from Doug Newell's high-decibel sound design.

While sometimes upstaged by its own cleverness, this thoughtful piece effectively frames the potential catastrophic consequences that go with being a believer rather than a knower — whether in a Florida condo or by implication a more prominent Pennsylvania Avenue address.

— Philip Brandes