✭✭✭✭✩

by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Ted Dykstra

Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

November 7-December 6, 2024

Ryan: “I think we share a specific kind of sadness”

When you watch A Case for the Existence of God, you have to put the rather daunting title in the back of your mind to focus more fully on the action unfolding in front of you. The 2022 play by American playwright Samuel D. Hunter has no overtly religious theme. Instead, is a slowly unfolding, closely observed depiction of how two men become friends even though they are complete opposites in almost every way. The acting is impeccable and the direction insightful and detailed. It is the perfect play to see to suggest that there is still hope even after it seems that all is lost.

The action of the play consists of the interactions between Ryan, a yogurt plant worker seeking to take out a loan, and Keith, a mortgage broker of the same age. Hunter has made the two men almost schematically opposite. Ryan is married, straight, White, poor, blue collar, undereducated, untravelled and financially naïve, while Keith is single, gay, Black, well-off, white collar, overeducated, widely travelled and financially savvy. What initially links them is that they each have a daughter. The two men met while picking their daughters up from day care and that is when Ryan learned that Keith knew about how to a mortgage.

The play is set in Twin Falls, Idaho (pop. 51,807), site of the world’s largest yogurt production plant, located in the panhandle of Idaho. Hunter portrays it as a place in the middle of nowhere replete with low expectations. In this parable-like play the town’s name could refer to the trajectory of two’s characters’ plotlines.

In the first scene we learn that Ryan, who is going through a divorce, is trying to buy a 12-acre plot of land that 90 years ago had belonged to his family. He wants to build a house on the spot where the old family homestead was so that he can give his daughter some sense of family. Both of Ryan’s parents were drug addicts and he wants this land to give himself and his daughter a new start.

Ryan is so naïve that he thinks if a bank sees his picture and realizes he’s a decent guy that they will know he is not a risk. Keith gently has to let Ryan know the truth that banks don’t work that way. Even though Ryan has no real collateral, Keith is willing to help Ryan out since he is touched by Ryan’s story and the fact that Ryan has come to define his future through his purchase of this land.

Keith has his own worries. He wants to have a child more than anything, but he has discovered that it is almost impossible for a single male to adopt a child. He has fostered a girl named Willa since infancy with the intent to adopt, when Willa’s aunt turns up and claims the child. Keith is in negotiation to keep Willa, but he lives in constant fear that she will be taken away from him. At this point we see further how Keith and Ryan are parallel opposites. Keith has property but fears to lose his child. Ryan has his child but fears to lose his property.

At each business meeting between the two men reveal more and more of their personal fears. As Ryan tells Keith, “I think we share a specific kind of sadness”. From this point on, as the action moves out of the office into Keith’s house and a playground where the men’s girls are playing, this bond of sadness draws the two closer together. This is not some silly “bromance” as found in television or movies, but a real, spiritual connection. Hunter is at pains to prove that a strong non-sexual friendship between a straight man and a gay man really can happen. The question is how either man will cope if he is denied the one thing – a child or land – that he has made central to his future and his identity.

Under Ted Dykstra’s thoughtful direction, Noah Reid as Ryan and Mazin Elsadig as Keith give sympathetic, understated performances and make the progress and hiccups in the path of the two men from strangers to friends feel completely natural. We understand that the two move from accidental revelations of their personal problems to the overt sharing of them because the two really have no one else to talk to who they feel will understand them.

Hunter’s text is unusual in that scenes suddenly skip forward in time – sometimes by a few days, sometimes by a few minutes – often without any change in lighting to signal the change. Dykstra has Reid and Elsadig manage these shifts perfectly clearly through coordinated alterations in posture and voice.

Reid presents Ryan as a kind-hearted man, inherently optimistic, too easily brushing off the negative things that happen to him because he seems to know the ways of the world so little. Elsadig presents Keith as a man who, as Black and gay, has had to work hard to succeed in a small town. Elsadig portrays a tension in Keith of trying to maintain an air of professionalism even though he is feeling crushed by fears of the future. While Reid shows Ryan’s reaction to disappointment by silently imploding, Elsadig shows Keith’s reaction by an ineffectually violent outburst.

Though all the action takes place on a set representing Keith’s office, events in the play move on to other locations. Nick Blais’s lighting is essential in signalling when we are in the office and when we are elsewhere such as Keith’s home or outdoors. Unlike the cramped cubicle that represented Keith’s office in the original production, Blais has given Keith an attractive, spacious office in a building built from the stone and wood of the land around it. An elegant place of work like this highlights the gap in wealth between Keith and his less fortunate client.

The one misstep in Dykstra’s direction is his use of a visual device in the final scene to indicate the passage of time. Unfortunately, this device seems to show that time is running out whereas the point of the scene it accompanies is that a new era in the lives of the two men is about to begin.

We learn that Keith has degrees in English and in Early Music with a special interest in polyphony. Polyphony, when developed in the Middle Ages and was the first time in European music when two complementary lines of music were played or sung simultaneously, thus creating harmony.

Dykstra and his cast seem to be fully aware that Hunter has constructed his play as a type of dramatic polyphony where Keith’s and Ryan’s stories are complementary. Ryan on first learning about polyphony from Keith says he would be very unhappy to live in a world without harmony. Keith agrees. Indeed, the lives of Hunter’s two protagonists do create a type of harmony in the sense of peace and mutual understanding that helps console both men in their despair.

Whether the possibility of this harmony between to opposite personalities makes a case for the existence of God or whether the surprising development at the very end of the play makes this case is left to individual audience members to decide. Even without reference to the supernatural, Hunter’s play demonstrates that in losing the thing we imagine as defining ourselves we may discovery something stronger and more sustaining. Coal Mine Theatre couldn’t have known it when it programmed its 2024/25 season, but a life-affirming play like this that demonstrates there is still hope in the midst of darkness is just what we need at a distressing time like the present.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Mazin Elsadig as Keith and Noah Reid as Ryan. © 2024 Cylla Von Tiedemann.

For tickets visit: www.coalminetheatre.com.