Ryan (Will Brill, left) and Keith (Kyle Beltran) field phone calls during a meeting about a mortgage application in A Case for the Existence of God, by Samuel D. Hunter.
Despite the lofty title, Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God is a play that at first might seem small, its subject matter as constrained as the little box of an office in which all the action takes place, dwarfed by the expanse of the Irene Diamond stage at Signature Theatre (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado). But as this sad and tender piece unfolds, it’s able to touch on universal questions by looking closely at the intersection of two ordinary lives during moments of particular vulnerability.
Ryan and Keith share a moment of quiet intimacy.
It all begins with a mortgage application. Ryan (Will Brill) is at the office of a mortgage broker named Keith (Kyle Beltran); the two supposedly met at their daughters’ day care in Twin Falls, Idaho (a state that many New Yorkers might be familiar with exclusively through Hunter’s plays set there), though it’s later revealed their paths have crossed before. Ryan doesn’t understand a word of his mortgage application—he doesn’t even understand that Keith is a broker and not a lender. The opening conversation moves among interest rates, the land that Ryan is interested in buying, the arbitrariness of the U.S. financial system, and observations on fatherhood. It all proceeds naturally, as Hunter carefully sketches the contrasts and connections between the characters in this first meeting.
Ryan, who is white and straight, works at a yogurt plant, while Keith, who is Black and gay, is college-educated. Keith’s enthusiasm about his double major of early music and English is a source for comedy (“I think it’s a little silly to put Monteverdi and Purcell in the same category as, like, early antiphons and motets”), but their educational differences emerge in smaller moments as well, such as Ryan not understanding some of Keith’s vocabulary.
“Hunter’s writing is sharp and compassionate.”
What unites and bonds Ryan and Keith is, in part, fatherhood: Ryan is going through a divorce and faces a looming custody battle over his daughter, Krista; Keith, after running into endless frustrations with adoption as a single gay man, is fostering to adopt, terrified that he will lose his daughter Willa to a possible “family reunification.” But more than this, they are bound by what Ryan calls “a specific kind of sadness.” And both actors’ performances, despite hardly ever moving from their respective office chairs, are so beautifully calibrated that the audience knows exactly what Ryan is referring to by that “specific sadness,” as it seems to exist deep in their bones.
Hunter’s writing is sharp and compassionate, somehow able to hover around the edges of the trite or sentimental but then avoid all those pitfalls and create remarkably real characters. David Cromer’s direction allows the realism of the play to coexist with moments of heightened theatrical artifice, a combination that, paired with first-rate naturalistic acting, proves quietly moving, including a breathtaking ending, which I won’t give away, as its effectiveness lies in the unexpected.
The two-character play is set in Idaho, as Hunter’s plays usually are. Photographs by Emilio Madrid.
Although the characters never physically leave the office, the play has many settings. The transitions between scenes are communicated by short pauses in the dialogue and changes of lighting (designed by Tyler Micoleau), such as a harsh office fluorescent or the dim lights of a living room late at night. The decision to have the banal office set be the background for every scene, whether at the playground or Keith’s house, is puzzling at first but ultimately feels apt: that bland room is where the characters first truly encounter each other, first locate that specific sadness in common. And while their relationship opens up beyond the office, it is also, for a while, constrained by it as well, as the question of Ryan’s would-be mortgage and the risks that Keith is willing to take loom large.
What’s refreshing about the play is that Ryan and Keith, aware of their differences, don’t constantly litigate or debate them, which isn’t to say that they are erased or don’t come up. But the play avoids a schematic rendering of the friendship, even while the characters discuss the appropriate physical connection for a straight man and a gay man or Keith’s erasure in high school as “the queer black kid.”
As the characters negotiate personal tragedies and wonder about the distant future and their responsibilities to each other, to generations gone, and to those to come, God doesn’t play an overt role. In fact, the play is more a case for the existence of humanism, the earthly miracle of two people finding connection amid a specific kind of sadness, and, at the end, perhaps even something resembling hope.
Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God runs through May 15 at Signature Theatre (480 W. 42nd St.). Evening performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees are Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, visit signaturetheatre.org or call (212) 244-7529.
