Though Ryan feels that “money is the only real permission I have to be alive,” he is so naïve about how it works, never having had any, that he suggests sending photos to potential lenders to show he’s a “decent guy.” Keith has likewise staked his life’s happiness - his very legitimacy - on institutions that find single men, let alone gay ones, inherently unworthy.Īs a parent by adoption myself, I have to say that the adoption plot felt absolutely authentic in a way it rarely does in plays. The two processes depicted in the play - getting a loan, adopting a child - turn out to be similar, at least for men who, for different reasons, are outsiders to the systems that control their fate. By making a home there, he hopes to show the courts considering his divorce from his wife that he is stable enough to share custody of their 15-month-old daughter. Indeed, he has come to Keith, a mortgage broker, with only a very small dream in his pocket: to repurchase 12 acres of property that once belonged to his family. Except for his being human, there is nothing huge about him, either heroic or horrendous, that would suggest the makings of a typical main character. Ryan is the primary beneficiary of that experiment here.
Earlier plays set in Lewiston, Boise, Pocatello and others have dealt with people failing to thrive in the barrenness of Costcos, Hobby Lobbys and sub-Olive Garden restaurants.Īnd though “A Case” makes the connection between personal and societal calamity more explicit than ever - can it be just an accident that it’s set in Twin Falls? - it may also be the purest example yet of Hunter’s approach to playwriting as an experiment in empathy. “A Case for the Existence of God,” which opened on Monday in a Signature Theater production directed exquisitely by David Cromer, is another of Hunter’s public explorations of his own private Idaho: a post-boom, existential vastness in which emotional and economic collapse are conjoined.
The question is: What is the purpose of a sadness you can share but not escape? We are somehow ready to understand that the unlikely statement is both powerfully true and, perhaps, universal. But by the time Ryan blurts out to Keith what he sees as their fundamental connection, Hunter’s meticulous plotting has led us to the same conclusion.