Bubba Weiler, who made a big mark last year with his masterful debut play Well, I’ll Let You Go, is no one-hit wonder. His compelling new drama, The Saviors, is a more intimate look at four lost or stiving souls in a similar Midwest setting. Michael (Ivan Howe) and Paul (Julius Rinzel) are eighth-grade altar servers in the local Catholic church, earnest young men who share a casual rapport and a hyper-seriousness about their faith and their upcoming Confirmation. Between contests to extinguish altar candles the quickest, they swap notes on lives of the saints.
While cleaning up after morning Mass one morning, they encounter a bedraggled twentysomething man named Julian (Stanley Simons), who begs them to allow him to remain in the church as shelter from the raging winter storm outside. (Leah Gelpe provides the sound design.) The two are flummoxed about what to do — how to live up to gospel message of helping the least of their brothers while recognizing the genuine risk to themselves and to the church building they are charged with protecting.
Howe and Rinzel are magnificent as the boys, old enough to articulate complicated church precepts while also naive about their own inchoate feelings (including Michael’s twinges of romantic attraction to his pal). Under Jack Serio’s careful direction, these adolescent actors perfectly capture the playfulness, the insecurity, and the stridency of a certain type of ultra-religious boy, as when Michael balks at playing “two truths and a lie” at a church youth group meeting. “I’m not sure about lying…in church,” he tells the leader, a middle-aged parishioner (Crystal Finn) whose son Michael esteems as a role model for becoming a missionary in Africa.
The Saviors also grounds us in the particulars of a place, from the boys’ jokes about a priest with egg breath to Avery Reed’s costumes capturing a Catholic school uniform to David Zinn’s church sanctuary set with its scuffed walls and well-worn beige carpet. (Stacey Derosier’s lighting amplifies some key moments, including scenes that appear to be lit only by the candles on the altar.)
Yes, you will probably guess Julian’s identity long before it’s revealed — but the fallout unfolds in ways that are surprising, if not always plausible. I wish that Weiler had spent a little more time sketching out his characters and their complicated relationships — and that Simons had flashed more evidence of Julian’s history of violent outbursts. But Finn is remarkable in revealing the conflicting urges of a woman in an impossible situation.
Weiler has emerged as one of the most precociously promising playwrights of the American theater. There’s a deep humanism that courses through his work that makes his characters compelling to watch even as they stumble about in the darkness of their lives, trying to do good as best they can. “Now I don’t know what to do because. Like I keep thinking okay, what would Jesus do, but it never says,” Michael says toward the end of the play. “He’s a kid and then all of the sudden he’s thirty So now I don’t know what to do.” Even in their confusion, though, Michael and the other characters in The Saviors have one constant despite their different relationships to their faith over time. Like habitual theater-goers seeking stories that will explain the world to them, they keep returning to a stained-glass sanctuary that they hope will illuminate their path forward. ★★★★☆
THE SAVIORS
Atlantic Theater Company, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through August 8 for $57 to $122