A dramaturgical note by Pancho Savery
No matter one’s status or situation in the world, troubles always arise. Sometimes they are external and political or social, and sometimes they are internal and emotional. Either way, the question is how we choose to respond and deal. One option is to try to ignore. There are the old standards encouraging this option such as “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” written in 1931 by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson, and most famously sung by Judy Garland; or “Put on a Happy Face,” written by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams in 1960, and sung by everyone from Dick Van Dyke, to Tony Bennett, to Liza Minnelli. On the other hand, we don’t always have the option of ignoring. Once again, the main question is how do we cope? How do we make meaning in a world that doesn’t always make sense?
In Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God, we are presented with two men who, on the surface, are as different from each other as two people can be. On the one hand, there is Ryan. He is white, working in a yogurt factory, and going through a divorce fighting with his soon to be ex-wife (who is in graduate school getting a master’s degree) over the custody of their fifteen-month-old daughter, Krista. His great dream is to buy a piece of land upon which he can build a house to live in with his daughter. This is not just any piece of land, but a small piece of the much larger tract once owned by his great grandfather, who, having psychological problems, burned the family house down with himself in it in the early 1900s. This is only a small part of Ryan’s past. His father died of a heart attack when Ryan was nine, and both his parents had significant drug problems. And in the present, he doesn’t speak to his mother or even know where she is. One time, he even had an experience in which his father woke him up in the middle of the night, took him into his truck, drove “like three or four hours” to the wilderness, “positioned the truck on the edge of this steep ridge and told me he was going to kill us both” (38), but eventually changed his mind. All of this raises the question of who Ryan actually was in high school. On the one hand, he was someone who had an extremely difficult time in his youth. It seems as though in high school, he tried to cover up his vulnerability by presenting a macho, non-vulnerable persona; or as he says, “I convinced myself for a really long time that I could just, like, force myself to be the person that I wanted to be” (39). Ryan was, to a certain extent, a loser. His parents were drug addicts, his father almost killed him, and his great grandfather committed suicide; but in high school, he found a way to recreate himself and be popular. But as he notes, “that only lasted so long” (40). Now, to a large extent, he considers himself to be a failure, and is desperate to right his life and make a home for and with his daughter. In order to do that and to prevent his soon-to-be ex-wife from gaining sole custody, he has to be able to get a mortgage to buy the land. His mortgage broker (not lender) is Keith. Although they went to high school together in Twin Falls, Idaho, they appear to be complete opposites. Where Ryan is white, straight, and working-class, owns a “shitty truck,” a dirt bike, and some guns, has a mother who “worked at the Pay ‘n Save when I was little before it was a Walgreens” (37), and is a factory worker who has never left the country, Keith is Black, gay, middle class, and has a lawyer as a father who took his family to Europe on vacations. Keith, the mortgage broker, wears professional work clothes, while Ryan wears jeans and a tee shirt. While Ryan has only a high school education, Keith went to college and graduated with a dual degree in Early Music and English, and “ended up working in finance,” as a result of what he calls “my useless education” (28). He can speak knowingly of Purcell, Monteverdi, and motets, but has no one to speak to about them. Although he has a stable job, he considers it a step down from what he could have done with his college degree. As he is Black and gay, he was not popular in high school. And although they went to the same high school at the same time, Ryan apparently has no memory of Keith, even though they were in several classes together. The one vivid memory Keith has of him is when Ryan made fun of a shirt he wore that had a parrot on it that his father had bought in San Diego.
Despite their surface differences, what Ryan and Keith have in common are their daughters. Both men are subjects of powers beyond their control. Ryan needs to be able to buy the land in order to convince the court that he has a stable enough life to deserve joint custody. Keith’s situation is significantly more complicated. As a single, gay, Black man, he wanted to have a child. He has gone through the surrogate option and twice had the birth mother change her mind, and he has had additional difficulty because some are opposed to single men adopting, let alone gay men. After little success, he has decided to go the route of being a foster parent with the option to adopt after a year. He found a woman who was addicted to drugs and gave up her daughter, who had to spend time in the NICU. Like Ryan, Keith is subject to powers beyond his control. He is waiting for the court to grant his adoption request, fearing every time his social worker calls that she is about to deliver bad news. Keith has, in fact, received bad news. Relatives of the birth mother have found out that he is both gay and single, and therefore believe that he is an unfit father candidate. Almost every day, Keith has the fear of having to face that he may no longer be Willa’s father, and will have to give her up to people she has never known, thus making him “like the most anxious dad on the planet” (12). And so at the outset, both men are deeply afraid and are struggling to maintain. Ryan’s and Keith’s daughters, both the same age, end up at the same daycare center in Twin Falls, where there are obviously few Black people and few gay people. It is when Ryan discovers that Keith is in the mortgage business that he comes to him for help, and this is where the play begins, with both men in the clutches of a legal system over which they have no control.
Ryan’s stress is primarily connected to money. As he says to Keith, “I guess I feel like having money is the only real permission I have to be alive? Like without it, I don’t have permission to exist” (10). We need to pause for a moment over these words. Hunter is making a profound point. In a capitalist world like ours, where class economic differences are significant, and the wealth gap between rich and poor widens every day, we need to think about, to quote Lenin, “What is to be Done?” Notice all the forms of oppression and discrimination in the play, those based on race, class, gender, marital status, and sexual orientation. A little later in the play, when Ryan is telling Keith where the property is, he notes that it isn’t too near “all those new houses they built” that are being quickly bought up by those “Fuckin’ California people” (18).
Although Keith is in a better economic situation than Ryan, his life has also had its share of ups and downs. Both men are uptight about their parental status. In Ryan’s case, because of his family background, he wonders whether he has the capacity to be a good parent, even though we can clearly see that he has been and is. But like Keith, his phone ringing immediately causes panic in case it has something to do with his daughter, or perhaps his job status. And of course, for Keith, he doesn’t even know if he will be able to remain a parent.
Another issue that separates the two is language. At the beginning of the play, Ryan wants to refer to Keith as a mortgage “lender,” and Keith has to remind him several times that he is, in fact, a mortgage “broker,” and explain what the difference is. Later, Keith will use the words “harrowing” and “tacitly,” neither of which Ryan knows the meaning of. And there is also at first a kind of class perspective in which Keith looks down on Ryan when, in talking about how “the financial system is convoluted,” he notes that “most of us realize that in college” (16). He knows that Ryan hasn’t gone to college, so this has to seem, at least partially, as a class putdown, and one especially interesting because it is the educated Black man putting down the less-educated white man. But Keith goes even further, noting that “you either play by the rules and pretend it all means something, or you don’t get anything. That’s most of what being an adult is” (16). This remark is troubling for several reasons. On the one hand, Keith’s use of the word “pretend” is especially noteworthy. Keith is both suggesting that he knows the capitalist agenda is a scam; but that if one wants to succeed, it is necessary to buy into it, and that he is more than willing to do it in order to succeed. Hunter here is making a very subtle but significant critique of capitalism. From the capitalist perspective, as the Rolling Stones would say, “success, success, success” is all that counts. If you have to sell your soul in order to achieve that success, that is what it means “to be an adult.” Clearly, Hunter is critiquing this position. While Keith has more success and more knowledge about how the world actually works, his position does raise the issue of the degree to which he has potentially sold out in order to achieve this level of “success.” He concludes with, “And you just hope that everyone else agrees to keep playing by the rules long enough so you have time to grow old and die.” This is both an extremely conservative and cynical position to take, not to mention fatalistic. Learn the game, play by the rules, don’t rock the boat, and you will succeed. This is also a narcissistic attitude of “I don’t care about the world. I just care about me and my individual welfare.” And as a Black man, it raises the question of potential naivete about the ability of a Black man to successfully make it in corporate America, let alone Idaho.
Over the course of the play, two interesting things happen. On the one hand, Ryan’s position in terms of his ability to secure a loan becomes more precarious. On the other hand, at the same time, the two men become closer, and actually start to become friends. Keith has evolved into almost a kind of father figure to Ryan. He even goes so far as to call in a favor in his boss’s name in order to help Ryan get a mortgage, and agrees to reduce his fee by half. They start spending time at each other’s house, where Keith explains, and Ryan gets, the concept of polyphony, causing Ryan to say, “I’m trying to picture living in a world that only has music without harmony” (41). They spend time together at the playground with their daughters, and they are each willing to bare their souls to the other about deeply personal matters. But when Keith is faced with the possibility of losing his daughter, their positions start to switch, and Ryan starts to become a father figure to Keith. This kind of intimate, vulnerable friendship between men expressing their emotions to each other is not something we see enough of on the American stage. This turns out to be especially interesting when we eventually learn that Ryan has stopped going to work, lost his job, had his credit score plunge, and hasn’t told Keith, which causes him to lose his job. And Ryan starts out his transformation completely awkwardly. He starts by asking Keith, “Are you with anyone,” which leads to an “awkward pause,” in which Ryan tries to cover up by noting that “You know, I was alone for a really long time before I got married to Laura. Like a really long time. I was – seriously unhappy” (33). It comes as no surprise that Keith is not moved by this inquiry; and Ryan further puts his foot in his mouth by trying to set Keith up with a Winco worker whom Keith has already had coffee with and found him to be “nice,” but “an idiot” (35).
Ryan’s lies to Keith and Keith’s subsequent loss of his job cause an explosion on his part, in which he trashes his desk, and wonders whether his relationship with Ryan has been performative. He wonders whether Ryan’s outreaches toward him have just been because he wanted help getting a mortgage, and accuses him of “ playing me this entire time” (62).
After Keith’s, “DON’T FUCKING [TOUCH ME] -!” (63) and his explosion of rage, we move to the play’s conclusion. For the first time in the play, Keith has stood; for the first time, there is a blackout, and “we hear the loud buzz of power lines overhead” (63). Only a few pages earlier, Ryan recalls that when he was alone in a shack contemplating the nature of the universe, that he also heard the wires making a “buzzing so loud” (57), and came to the existential conclusion that what was going on with him was part of something larger, that “Maybe there’s something wrong with the world right now, something really bad” (58-59). That “something bad” has severely affected both of them, but ultimately for the better. Keith has lost his job and packs up his desk, discovering one of Willa’s toys. But he has accepted the reality of Willa’s being gone forever. This is reflected in the changing of the space. The “harsh fluorescent lighting” (59) of Keith’s office is replaced by “the warm glow of a sunset” (64). Ryan has also accepted the fact that someone has out-bid him for the land. Earlier, he had said that building a life for Krista was the “important thing”; and when Keith counters with, “But you could do that without buying twelve acres and building a house,” Ryan’s response is, “I actually don’t know if I can” (45). So now, when Ryan says that buying the land and building a house “doesn’t matter” (64), it is clear that he has changed significantly, and that he can see his life, his parenthood, and his priorities in a new light. He has also had the courage to confront his landlord about his broken freezer. Most significantly, he has accepted that his ability to see Krista only on weekends is “my own damn fault, I lost my job” (65). Prior to this, he has taken no responsibility for how his life has turned out. In a similar vein, Keith recounts the physical act of having to give up Willa, concluding, “I don’t know how to move past this. I don’t know what to do” (66). What happens next is an extraordinary moment. On several occasions, Ryan has previously tried to touch Keith; and on each occasion, Keith has rejected the touch. But now, as the stage directions tell us, “Then, as if by instinct, they move toward each other. Their arms find each other’s bodies, and slowly, they begin to hold each other,” and Keith asks, “Do you think we’re gonna be okay?” (66). Both men have gone through a traumatic experience of loss from which they need to recover.
In the chapter “Religion as a Cultural System,” in his book The Interpretation of Cultures, anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes that “[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with chaos” (99). This, I would argue, is a case for the existence of God and religion. People have a need to believe that the world is more than chaos, that there is some purpose or meaning to life. For many people, religion and God provide the alternative to a world that often seems chaotic, meaningless, and purposeless. It/they help people deal with the most difficult circumstances. It is interesting to note that despite the play’s title, neither God nor a case for her existence are ever mentioned, not even vaguely. What, then, are we to make of the title? What is the case the play makes? I’m arguing that the play makes a simple but profound statement; and that is, to quote E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), “only connect”; or, as Ezra Pound noted in his final Canto 116, “It coheres all right even if my notes do not cohere.” The ability to make a meaningful connection with someone is what makes the world make sense, regardless of how that connection comes about. As Ryan notes about a third of the way through the play, “I hope this isn’t weird of me to say but – I think we share a specific kind of – sadness. You and me” (25). Two men, with little in common, are able to bond over their love of their daughters. Again, Keith’s last line in the play, to which Ryan doesn’t respond while they continue to hold each other, is, “Are we… Do you think we’re gonna be okay?” (66). The play’s answer is a resounding yes. The two male actors, with no change of costume, etc., are suddenly transformed into their daughters many years later. Krista has managed to find and reach out to Willa, who has been renamed Chloe. Both now have children. Chloe has only the vaguest remembrance of Keith, but she does have a memory of his face, or what she thinks of as his face, and she wonders if Keith would ever want to hear from her. Krista sends her a photo of the two of them from when they were toddlers playing and holding hands at the playground. Both agree that despite everything they have each gone through, they are fine, “mostly.” We also learn that Keith and Ryan have remained friends, and that Krista views Keith as “practically my uncle” (68).
Hunter, though, doesn’t leave us in some world of perfect heaven where everything works out. Both women worry about what life in the future will be like for their children, and wish that they could put a “pause on everything” so that “things felt more permanent” (69). This almost exactly echoes Ryan’s earlier thought, “What world are we inviting them into? Are we raising them just so they can get, like, nuked out of existence?” (54). But as we know, permanence doesn’t exist; and the best we can hope for is that “Maybe it’s okay” (69). In this last line, I am reminded of Sartre’s theory of existentialism in which humans have to make the world make sense when outside forces can’t, or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which the characters have to make their world make sense, even if Godot never arrives. Hunter’s play makes clear that however tentative things might appear, cynicism is never the right option, that we have to have faith that things will work out, and that there’s actually “good left in the world” (46).
In addition to what this play is about: the emotional relationship between two men, the loss they suffer, the relationship between their daughters, the need to have hope in a troubled world and avoid cynicism, how this play does what it does is equally important. I would like to think of this play’s “how” in terms of music. Beckett, and later Harold Pinter, pioneered the use of the stage directions “pause” and “silence,” and the difference between them. In A Case for the Existence of God, some form of the word “pause” is used approximately 202 times, which is more than two times per page. Sometimes it is just “pause,” but there is also “awkward pause” and “short pause.” Some form of “silence,” although used much less frequently, is used at least 34 times; and like “pause,” “silence” is sometimes simply “silence,” but also “awkward silence,” or “long silence,” or “odd silence,” or “a long tense silence.” In a play like this, where the playwright gives no clues as to the differences between these various terms, it is up to the play’s director to figure this out, and she must end up in a similar position to the leader of a jazz band or the conductor of a symphony of European Classical music to work with the actors/musicians to “score” these terms. To get this play is not only to hear the words, but to carefully listen to what comes in between them.