A Case for the Existence of God at Theater Exile
A well-acted production of an interesting two-hander, held back by poor production design.
A Case for the Existence of God
by Samuel D Hunter at Theater Exile. January 10, 2024. Final preview before opening. Directed by Matt Pfeiffer. Philadelphia premiere.
There’s a few minor spoilers in this review, each with warnings before them.
We wind through a green room to take our seats in the black box. After a curtain speech where we’re encouraged to applaud funders, music fades up and the lights slowly fade down. Two actors take their place in the dark. The harsh lighting of an office comes up and we meet Ryan (played by Keith J Conallen) mid-conversation as he seeks to get a mortgage from broker Keith (Isaiah Caleb Stanley). They’re in a cubicle, one with an oddly tall wall, and an oddly handsome dark wood desk. Everything other than the desk and a handful of office objects on the set by Thom Weaver, who also lit the show, is gray. Gray floor, gray walls. Cubicle. There’s the normal office trappings. There are two chairs, one on each side of the desk. Everything is either parallel or perpendicular to the audience, and the desk separates the two actors forming an insurmountable barrier. Visually and physically, this is a play about three things: men, a desk, and the chairs they’re sitting in.
There’s a Dell and a desk lamp. Some file folders. We’re in a small city of fifty thousand in Idaho. Keith and Ryan know each other because their kids are in the same daycare, and Ryan wants help getting a mortgage to buy property that used to belong to his family so he can raise his daughter there. They form an unlikely friendship: Ryan is tired of the system, the churn of capitalism (never said in so few words), and sees a kindred spirit in Keith after he lets down his guard and goes on a mild rant against the financial system, offering his downwardly mobile insight that (paraphrasing), “you have to pretend to believe in it long enough to live a good life.” Both men are struggling to build families: Ryan, going through a divorce, believes a loan will secure a future for his family. Keith is hoping to adopt a foster child that he’s been raising since she was born.
In many ways, this is a play about men’s parental rights, and well, whatever, right? I’m not convinced we need stories that lean toward sympathy with the rights of fosters and fathers, who each have their own distinct line of tragedy here. But we do need stories about building friendship and healthy bonds among men, especially across differences, and about the systematic problems arrayed against them (and everyone else). These themes, the ways family law sucks (that is, it’s structured to protect the hetero-patriachial biological-and-nuclear family), and how capitalism is a bitter machine ruining working people’s live, hum in the background (i.e., the dispossession of Ryan’s family from their land, which, if the land acknowledgement at the top of the show was echoing in anyone’s head, is traditional territory of the Shoshone or Bannock peoples. If I ran a theater serious about decolonization, I would want to mention that up top and not just hope for the implication! Apologies for such a long parenthetical) and are occasionally given glancing blows (“these people from California,” “developers,” etc).
Idk. There’s something about this kind of play that smacks of rural tourism for bourgeois city folk. Like you can’t go on a real rural poverty tour, but you can go see a play about it.
There are three parallel plots, the main thrust being about how difficult it is for men to connect with each other. Keith and Ryan’s growing friendship and its trials and travails is the one bit of dramatic action that happens on stage. There’s also a lot of off-stage action involving both Keith and Ryan’s family lives, which are very parallel, the very basis of their bond, which spills over and informs the on-stage action. The titular “case” (mild spoiler here) seems to be a happy resolution in the future that’s almost saccharine in a final scene that kind of ruins the play that came before it, attempting to resolve questions raised by the previous 90 minutes. The ending answer’s Ryan’s insistence, in moments of crisis, that you have to believe things are gonna be okay. That things have to “make sense.” But okay for whom, Ryan and Keith? For their kids? Ryan’s insight that things don’t make sense, that things are wrong with the world, is much more valuable than college-educated Keith’s understanding that the system sucks but it is what it is. It’s not so great, then, that Ryan is maybe less than entirely sane. It doesn’t take a family history of mental illness to be crushed by the indignities of capitalism, let alone to understand that the world is all sorts of fucked up.
Ryan has other little insights. He points out their children may live to see the year 2100. Climate change is never mentioned, but sure seems to me like an obvious thing to be concerned about for a child who would see the 22nd century—a time that seems so distant to our leaders that it’s not even taken into account in many climate calculations. Plenty of room to have slid in even an off-hand line about mortgages and flood insurance. Hunter seems to be dancing around meatier subject matter, almost carefully avoiding it: what kind of world are children inheriting? What about when things don’t work out? If the “Case” is that things have worked out in the future, by golly, it requires a touch of wilfull ignorance to not imagine that the world is even more fucked in a couple decades. But I suppose that’s what a narrow focus on the personal can do.
Back to the desk. The desk. A big desk in the center of the stage. It seems to be an insurmountable gap between Ryan and Keith. They are never on the same side of it. Perhaps it’s a visual metaphor for the class barrier between these men, the downwardly mobile gay black finance bureaucrat from a middle class family and the white factory worker from a family of mentally ill addicts. This is in a setting that is overwhelmingly white, though race seems absent from the play (minor spoiler again) except for Ryan not remembering Keith from school, even when it’s mentioned. “Of course you don’t remember the queer black kid”—which, imo, is extra weird considering the demographics of Idaho, literally 1% African American. Otherness can render people hypervisible, and I think it's a tell of the white gay playwright’s hand that Hunter renders it as a form of invisibility. Your high school experience may vary, but it strained my disbelief—especially when Ryan is, at his current state in life, aware of what cashier at the store is gay. Hunter is setting up these characters as near opposites, and then to show, surprise, that they actually have a lot in common in unexpected ways once we learn that they’re both single dads. Of course, they’re actually both working class the entire time. They’re just on different sides of a desk (to be totally clear, this desk is a production design choice).
Minor spoiler here: only at the end of the play are they not separated by the desk, in a scene where they’re outside the office, and the desk stands in for natural scenery that they literally stand on. They are equaled, having transcended/escaped/been removed from the relationship of the office, the relation put on them by capital, and they’re finally just people.
Unfortunately, as nice a visual metaphor that is, the desk is also a literal physical barrier to the building of intimacy between the two actors. It’s also perpendicular to the audience, rendering all of the staging very flat—they’re almost always exactly opposite each other—and limits the actors choices for movement (and will they ever stand up?). Being stuck sitting also doesn’t help the actors. Conallen handles it well enough but Stanley seemed to sink into his chair in a way that wasn’t always a character choice. Conallen also kind of outclasses Stanley, his voice work and presence is stronger through the whole show (he’s also a member of Actors’ Equity, Stanley is not). Conallen is consistently louder, and it made me wonder if they were in the same play Conallen’s character is a louder, brasher figure than Stanley’s Keith, a quiet guy into early music (a bit which yields some of the best jokes in the show), but it goes beyond character. Both actors deliver solid performances, but Conallen is stronger. The design, again, doesn’t help things: the flatness means constantly looking to the left—back to Conallen—who is also frequently lit better. Pfeiffer’s perpendicular staging does nothing to compensate for the way we are trained to read left-to-right, always snapping back to the Conallen’s Ryan, eveh when Stanley’s Keith should be the focus. A couple scenes move their office chairs to the downstage end of the desk, but still on opposite sides of it, to serve as Ryan and Keith’s homes. But in one, a practical lamp on the desk stays on the whole time, drawing attention up to… a desk organizer?
When I saw it, there was a lot of air in the play. The supposed 90 minute run time was closer to 105 minutes. Maybe this will tighten up with the play officially “opening,” but 15 minutes? The play builds a lot of momentum, barrelling forward with scene changes that take only a few seconds where the actors don’t even move out of their chairs (will they ever stand up??). But the penultimate scene ends in a long blackout. It’s one that’s earned by high conflict (why are people shouting in a cubicle?), but it also gives the play a false ending as the blackout drags on for the only scene change involving a stage hand through the entire show. The wind is knocked out of the play’s climax. I was about to start applauding when the lights came back up.
The text works best for me at its most poetic, at the “specific kind of sadness” and a soggy book of matches. The production works best when Keith and Ryan are at a playground watching their kids together (sitting in the office chairs still, but downstage, as if on opposite ends of an extra long park bench, still desk-width apart). Their joy and fun, revealed even in their shared warnings and light scoldings of the toddlers behavior, is infectious. This reveals the fundamental weakness of the production, what it could have had in so many other scenes: here they’re still not physically close, but they look out, ahead of them into the audience, waving to their children and pointing to get down “from there.” Without the desk between them (only behind them), their relationship is free to develop, the actors are free to really interact. It’s a shame they’re not able to do it for the whole show.
Recommended, with qualifications. A well-acted production of a pretty good and interesting play, held back by poor staging. Continues through January 21st. Tickets available at theatreexile.org.
Substack has a Nazi problem
I’m not a keen follower of this but people who are have informed me that Substack has a sizable presence of Nazis using the platform and that Substack leadership really, really fumbled in how they’ve handled this. So. I’m looking for a new platform for Plays Unpleasant and hope to complete a transfer by the end of the month
Join me in doing anti-war theater
Friends, I am actively seeking out people to collaborate with on theatrical and cultural events in Philadelphia that are against the genocide in Gaza and the spreading conflict in the region. Please reach out to me if this is something you’re interested in doing and have some time or resources to offer. We’ll be doing more in the future, but in the near-term I’m looking for actors and other collaborators for an event next week. Please reach out to me at matthewsekellick [at] gmail.com
IN OTHER NEWS
The Kimmel Cultural Campus and Philadelphia Orchestra, which is one organization with a mouthful of a terrible but descriptive name, has rebranded as Ensemble Arts Philadelphia, which is much shorter but also much less descriptive. The change was prompted in part by theater-goers showing up to the Kimmel Center rather than, say, the Academy of Music, just up the street, when going to see touring musicals. Shows will be billed as “Ensemble Arts Philly presents…” and they have unveiled a new website, as well as a new logo that communicates absolutely nothing. Meanwhile the legal name of the organization remains The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center, Inc. Surely this change will not lead to additional confusion, especially with a name as non-descript as “ensemble arts,” which will surely not be confused with Penn Live Arts or the former Philadelphia Live Arts (now known as FringeArts).
One way to think of this is as a consequence of consolidation. The Kimmel Center, Philadelphia Orchestra, Academy of Music, The Miller Theater, and Forrest Theater (owned by the Shubert's but hosts a Broadway tour series with Ensemble Arts)
The new name seems especially silly in a city with more than the average number of ensemble troupes. It may help prevent some people from going to the wrong venue, but it does little to clear anything else up.
Next week! A Gender-full entry
The promised look back at Twelfth Night and Rose: You Are What You Eat will be in your inboxes—it took a backseat to actually covering new, local theater. In the meantime, since Rose is open in New York, I’ll preview it: not recommended, with redeeming qualities.