By Carol Davis
SAN DIEGO—Local premieres are great motivators for audiences interested in seeing productions not mounted in our fair city before. Unless you do a lot of theatre travel to catch world premieres the next best things are local premieres. Ion Theatre Company, always in the front lines of risk taking and in its sixth season just opened the funny, edgy, tragic and complicated San Diego premiere, Grace written by playwright Craig Wright and skillfully directed by Glenn Paris.
Playwright Wright whose other credits list an Emmy nomination for the episode of “Twilight” for the TV series Six Feet Under, served as writer and producer for Lost, Brothers and Sisters and his own series Dirty Sexy. He takes us down a windy, fraught-with-boobytrapped pop-up’s in his latest; Grace, starring Francis Gercke as Steve, a religious zealot who enters into a gigantic hotel land deal, sight unseen. with a money lender who is a phantom. That he falls for it hook, line and sinker without forethought would be untruthful. Steve is a believer! “He talked to the stars and they talked back”… (“I asked the Lord for five million and Mr. Himmelman is giving me fourteen million”.)
But don’t be misled by Steve and his wife Sara (Rhisnna Basore), their commitment to their God, their trusting marriage and their willingness to put their faith in a higher power. What you see in Grace is not what you get. What you get in Grace is a dose of high-level hypocrisy, mystery, rage, ah ha religious moments laced with cynical humor, the questioning of science vs. religion, and a foreseeabke tragedy for the four characters in the play that are on a collision course with death.
Brace yourselves! The first sound you hear is a gunshot. The second is a blood-curdling scream! And then the play rewinds itself as the story unfolds back in time at a nondescript condo on the Florida shore leading up to the scenes seen before our eyes. Steve and Sarah, transplants from Minneapolis, are awaiting news about a big money deal to build or restore a series of religiously themed motels (Crossroads Motel? The New RESTament?) equipped with Baptismal baths, chapels, etc.
Steve, once a small time operator, is now dealing with cooperate America and all the greed surrounding big multi million-dollar land and bank deals. He sees little or no conflict in accepting money from an unknown source with no strings attached.
While preaching his particular form of Christianity, even in soliciting money (to help him with a cash flow problem he has) in the name of Jesus from his next-door neighbor, Steve’s naïveté is laughable. (“Sam,” he tells the neighbor, a NASA researcher and badly scarred survivor of a deadly car accident that killed his fiancée) “you’re a scientist. You’re an athlete of the mind….” “I’m not a knower, I’m a believer. And that’s what real estate is all about. It’s about faith”.
In another twist of irony, the bug exterminator Karl (Jim Chovick), a German Holocaust survivor, non-believer and non-Jew is making his rounds for the management spraying the condos. When he finds out Steve is a fundamentalist Christian, Karl goes off about how his family hid Jewish children because his father thought the Jews were God’s secret. But when Rachael, the first girl to kiss him was taken from her hiding place to the camps and the Allied bombers hit his native Hamburg and he saw his mother on fire and his father struck by a fallen piano, he became the skeptic now wielding the extermination torch (of bugs, that is).
A confirmed atheist, he challenges Steve to show how his God could have let so many innocent children die? And there’s more.
Grace, a mixed blessing for religious zealots, is a play that keeps on giving until …things go from bad to worse in Steve’s world; his money doesn’t come in
on time or at all, he develops a nerve wracking itch and twitch that about drives him insane, and his wife is falling in love with their neighbor, Sam.
Sam, overcome with grief falls into Sara’s grace filling the void he feels from his tragedy and somewhere lost in transition, Steve’s perfect universe is
spinning out from under him.
With a tiptop cast in hand Ion’s production of Grace is edge-of-your-seat spellbinding. Francis Gercke’s Steve is just what the playwright might have ordered. If I weren’t so cynical, I might have even bought what he was selling–that’s how convincing he is. Gercke is up to his fine quirky style in the personification of someone totally dedicated to his calling in a world where redemption and divine providence intersect with science and business and where he learns too late that the latter two are no match for the weak and socially malnourished. But it’s the scratching and itching that is enough to develop your own rash that makes you squirm in you seat that you will remember.
Rhianna Basore is understated as Sarah; Steve’s questioning, less gullible but religious partner. It’s evident from the beginning that there is a disconnect in their marriage and that her constant trips to the next-door neighbor will visit grief on everyone concerned. Under Paris’ deft direction though, it happens ever so slightly over a period of visits that, even though we see it coming, Steve is clueless. Jim Chovick, making his Ion debut, is perfectly cast as the seriously droll man in the blue coveralls with a story to tell. He also holds the poisonous formula aimed at the baseboards meant to kill the creepy crawlers inside but instead delivers
a nasty dose of whatever mixture is in the tank, to susceptible humans.
Matt Scott’s dual-purpose, clean-lined set is two apartments rolled into one where the two families reside together but separately, reminding me of a set seen in Alan Aykbourn’s How The Other Half Loves ages ago. Melanie Chen’s sound design and Karin Filijan’s lighting design add to the heightened anxiety throughout the production.
Grace is an important piece and worthy of being seen especially in a time where the unrest, hatred and narrow mindedness of some rely so heavily on religion that reason and soundness are drowned out by the drumbeat only a few can hear.
There are lessons to be learned also from the characters and the journey they take in Wright’s play. But more than ever now, we have to remember that there are no right or wrong, good or bad answers to the age-old questions of how God and Science can co exist in our world; they just do.
See you at the theatre.
Dates: through Sept. 10th
Organization: ion theatre company
Phone: 619-600-5020
Production Type: Comedy/drama
Where: 3704 6th Avenue, Hillcrest
Ticket Price: $29
Web: iontheatre.com
Venue: BLKBOX 6th @Penn
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Davis is a San Diego-based theater critic. She may be contacted at carol.davis@sdjewishworld.com