It’s twilight in a small town in southern Idaho. There’s a housing crisis, widespread poverty, rampant drug addiction, and high levels of crime. Lost jobs, lost souls. Shuttered shops and hollow hearts. The sun is going down on the American dream and in the modest office of a Main Street mortgage broker there’s a man who thinks his problems will be solved by taking on more debt and still more debt.

Is this a boiler-plate scenario for yet another jeremiad on the declining quality of life in heartland America? Well, yes, sort of, but the story Samuel D. Hunter has built on these commonplace beginnings is nonetheless moving. In fact, A Case for the Existence of God, which won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play in 2022, is nothing less than a beautiful tearjerker: an emotionally rich drama about friendship, fatherhood, and the persistence of hope in dark times.

Ryan is trying to finance the purchase of some land that his great-grandparents once owned. Keith is his mortgage broker, and most of the play’s ten or so scenes happen in his sparsely furnished office. The two men are a study in contrasts. One, the broker, played by Kevin Hofbauer in this fine Red Stitch production, is black and moderately wealthy, the college-educated son of a local lawyer. The other, played by Darcy Kent, is poor and white, a man whose parents were drug addicts and neglected him badly. Nonetheless, a real friendship develops, one of those intense alliances in which each man seems to recognise himself – as Jacques Derrida writes – in the eyes of the other.

Initially, the two men bond over the pleasures and travails of fatherhood. They are both devoted dads, and yet they both struggle with a fear of losing their child or rather of having their child taken from them. Ryan, it emerges, is navigating a custody battle, while Keith, who is single, is fostering a child he hopes to adopt. Hunter’s nuanced intertwining of their respective joys and anxieties, their faltering confessions of doubt, is deeply moving. This is an unusually sensitive and faceted portrayal of fatherhood.

We are told, however, that there is a deeper affinity between the two, something that goes beyond the common experience of parenthood. There is, it seems, a spiritual connection. Early in the play, Ryan observes in a moment of unusual eloquence that the two men share a ‘specific kind of sadness’. The insight surprises and intrigues Keith, who can’t quite reconcile this version of Ryan with the version he remembers from high school. This is very much the Kernsatz – the central figure – in Hunter’s meditation on the malaise in middle America, which is repeated several times throughout the play.

What is this sadness? In fact, it is not specific at all, but vague and difficult to articulate. It may, of course, stem from Ryan and Keith’s fear of being separated from their daughters, but Hunter hints at a deeper, more existential grief. Perhaps it is the sorrow of an impossible desire, a longing to redeem a past that is irredeemable? It is, in any case, something to do with loss and inheritance.

Darcy Kent as Ryan (left) and Kevin Hofbauer as Keith (photograph by Jodie Hutchinson)

For Ryan, this sadness is most clearly expressed in his futile efforts to buy back the land once owned by his great-grandparents. He grapples with mental health challenges and, at times, seems possessed by spectres of the past, as if he were succumbing to the same psychosis that led his great-grandfather to kill himself. Kent is excellent in this complex role, baffled between self-doubt and loyalty to his new friend, between black depression and guileless optimism.

Hofbauer’s performance is equally commendable, particularly because of his ability to show the comic and the tragic in Keith’s situation. Ryan is a strange choice of confidant, and there are many misunderstandings and moments of awkwardness:

KEITH. Yeah, I tried just going the straight adoption route before I started looking into fostering. It was – harrowing.
RYAN. ‘Harrowing’?
KEITH. Yeah.
RYAN. I don’t know that word.
KEITH. Oh, it just means like – distressing. It was difficult and distressing. The process.

The dialogue is like that throughout, always breaking up on difficult words and the difficult experiences to which they refer.

Despite its twilight mood, the play has plenty of gritty detail. The symbolism of the town’s name – Twin Falls – is rather heavy. Ryan and Keith, of course, are the twins – at one point Keith is even referred to as the uncle of Ryan’s child – and they both fall hard. On the other hand, Twin Falls is also a real town: the yoghurt plant where Ryan works is one of the largest in the world. The frequent references to the geography of southern Idaho adds a layer of authenticity to the story. These elements are not merely decorative but create living connections between the two characters and the environment they inhabit.

Director Gary Abrahams handles the play’s pacing efficiently, avoiding lingering silences and making a few subtle cuts to maintain momentum. There’s no moping or brooding; this is not an ostentatiously gloomy production. It moves briskly, with purpose, but never feels rushed. Emotion is built through a clear rendering of the text and its exquisitely broken rhythms, to which Abrahams and his actors are superbly attuned. The result – for the audience, at least – is an extraordinary carnival of sniffles and tears.

Set designer Jeremy Pryles has set the small office adrift in a pool of black water surrounded by walls lined with shiny black plastic. At the end of each scene, props that are no longer needed are tossed into the pool where they either sink or float off into a corner: an effective but unobtrusive device. It reinforces the anxieties that plague Keith and Ryan – that sense of impending doom, the feeling that things are out of control and the world might disappear – without exaggerating them.

But what about God? If there was ever a title that drew attention to itself, then this is it. The spiritualist pretensions of the play are, I think, just that: pretensions. Those moments that appear calculated to evoke the work of grace in the world – in the sense of a transformative power that helps individuals endure suffering – are the least successful. Indeed, it’s almost as if such moments – for example, Keith and Ryan’s inebriated debate on the origins of early harmonic music – are placeholders for deeper insights that Hunter hesitated to fully explore.

Hunter, it seems, wants to convince us that it is not twilight in America but rather dawn. Whatever Keith and Ryan are suffering now – this too shall pass. Whether or not you find this perspective convincing – or comforting – it doesn’t detract from appreciating the other achievements of this affecting production.

A Case for the Existence of God continues at the Red Stitch Actors Theatre until 12 May 2024. Performance attended: 18 April.