Grace

Cort Theatre, New York

(212) 239-6200

***

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“Broadway isn’t often the place to ponder big questions,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. That’s why the ambition of this 2004 Craig Wright play is striking. Four characters lie dead in the opening scene, and as Grace proceeds to unpack the events that led to the carnage, it brings God’s existence under interrogation and explores “the gray zone separating divine intervention from fate.” A sterling quartet of actors—led by Paul Rudd as a born-again Christian who, in the play’s extended flashback, is trying to launch a chain of Jesus-themed hotels—proves deft in handling the writing’s subtleties. This Broadway premiere “won’t be for everyone,” but it generates a compellingly unsettling mood.

Unfortunately, the time-rewinding device feels like “a lot of fussy bric-a-brac” veiling the play’s loose ends, said Scott Brown in New York magazine. Grace has moments: There are “a couple of flawlessly uncomfortable scenes” in which the optimism of Rudd’s evangelical collides with the despair of his Florida neighbor, a former NASA scientist (Michael Shannon) who’s recently been disfigured by a car accident. Playing a jaded pest exterminator, Ed Asner helps make the show “highly watchable” throughout, in part because Wright is able to “pass power, offense, and attack back and forth between characters like nobody’s business.” But it’s clear early on that Rudd’s character doesn’t stand a chance against his next-door rival, while his wife, played by Kate Arrington, comes off as “just another inchoate woman getting rag-dolled between rampaging males.”

“If Grace is remembered in years to come,” it will be because of Boardwalk Empire’s Shannon, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. As the wounded man he portrays begins questioning his atheism and falls for his neighbor’s wife, Shannon’s “electrically anxious acting”gives weight to the character’s plight. “Grace isn’t as intellectually unsettling as it means to be,” but Shannon gives it “achingly human impact.”