The blessing – and curse – of community theater is lowered expectations. So when those are far exceeded, you exit feeling buoyed yet suspect of just how buoyed you should legitimately feel.
Theatre Company of Lafayette is a scrappy little company housed in a funky 75-seat space that affords audiences the most generous legroom you’ll find in any theater. It’s been making noise of late with brazen initiatives and artistic consistency.
“The Diviners” is the troupe’s latest competent effort, but with 37 productions currently playing around the state, happening upon a gem like this one can be akin to finding water with a rod. Director Ed Schoenradt’s staging is a humble and earnest effort, complete with many of the charming insecurities you’d expect at this level – and two disarmingly honest performances you might only expect on a much more prominent stage.
Jim Leonard Jr. wrote “The Diviners” at age 24, and though it’s wholly derivative of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” The New York Times’ Frank Rich was impressed enough in 1981 to call him out as “a writer of exceptional promise.” Today, Leonard is a TV scribe who helms CBS’s Friday-night legal yawner “Close to Home.” Ironically, he just penned a play called “The Anatomy of Gray.”
Leonard is a true Hoosier, and “The Diviners” (like “Close to Home”) is set in his home state of Indiana. The time is the 1930s – it’s the Great Depression – and the place is Zion, population 40. In this town, progress means light bulbs, tractors and Singer sewing machines.
Mechanic Ferris Layman (Russ Orr) is a compassionate patriarch and single father to Jennie Mae (Rachel Doyle) and Buddy (Geoff Bangs) – who, at age 3, suffered brain damage from a near drowning.
Since, Buddy has been intellectually trapped at the age he was when he capsized. But he’s now able to suss out hidden watering holes and predict rain so accurately the farmers set their calendars by him.
Yet Buddy is terrified of water in any form – and now a treatable, spreading case of ringworm threatens to blind him because he refuses to be washed.
This motif of water as both giver and taker of life dominates this poignant tale of loss from title to epilogue. Enter drifter C.C. Showers (a moniker only a 24-year-old playwright would dare apply). C.C. is a fallen preacher from Hazard, Ky., (another youthful telegraph) who strikes up an unlikely friendship with sweet, simple Buddy.
Schoenradt’s staging recalls Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” – on a mostly bare set with no blackouts and minimal or mimed props. Like Wilder’s Grover’s Corners, there’s a naive lack of ostracism or prejudice. Schoenradt elicits likable performances throughout, but the interchanges between Bangs as Buddy and Jared Wilson as the conflicted preacher are outstanding.
Bangs embodies a now 14-year-old man-child awash in boyish wonder, irrational kid fears and a sense of guilt he doesn’t even have the capacity to understand. Bangs effectively conveys this conflict with wide eyes, an ebullient spirit – and constant scratching.
Wilson, perfectly cast if only for those lost, doleful eyes, delivers a performance remarkable for its gentle honesty and quiet humanity. You never learn what brought this exiled angel into this town that hasn’t had its own preacher in a decade. No matter. He’s now just a man who sees his own redemption in bringing Buddy to water – he’ll leave it to the town henpeckers to find the baptismal symbolism in the act.
Each act of this play builds to a powerful climax both emotional and theatrical, bathed in sadness and innate goodness.
It’s unfortunate that community theater stagings are often so necessarily short. “The Diviners” dries up after Saturday. If you can still work it in, it’s worth a drink.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
—————————————————
| “The Diviners”
DRAMA|Theatre Company of Lafayette|Written by Jim Leonard Jr.|Directed by Ed Schoenradt|THROUGH SATURDAY|At the Mary Miller Theater, 300 E. Simpson St., Lafayette|Final performances 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday|2 hours, 25 minutes|$10-$15|720-209-2154 or tclstage.org
