The Saviors is a step back in time, to when the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater housed a church. And it returned me to my early teen years. I wasn’t a Catholic school student or an altar boy like its two protagonists but I was steeped in church lore, at least until after my confirmation, when I got restless with its teachings and dictates and began to slip away. Today I’m a deacon at my progressive Presbyterian church, though my boyhood Catholicism remains part of my life.
For 14-year-old Michael (Ivan Howe) catechism is everything. The play observes him in his rituals, tidying up the sanctuary after mass in advance of a blizzard and chatting about the saints with his BFF Paul (Julius Rinzel). But Paul, a prankish sort given to off-color jokes and behavior, is more skeptical, and weary of Michael’s religiosity and clinginess. The storm, or, rather, a storm, arrives, in the form of Julian (Stanley Simons), a homeless, drug-addled drifter seeking shelter that only the rules-bending Paul, intrigued by the visitor, is willing to offer. Paul and Julian, who has his own ties to the church, converse, and in so doing the boy, resistant to the path Michael is following, is awakened to the larger world and its problems and complications. Anxious that Paul is pulling away from him Michael finds solace with Judy (Crystal Finn), the cheery middle-aged window who runs the church’s youth group (which numbers Michael as its only member). Judy’s son is an African missionary, which in Michael’s eyes makes her a kind of saint, a “church MVP.” But this saint, a sadly human one, has feet of clay.
Playwright Bubba Weiler and director Jack Serio had an award-nominated hit last season with the wrenching Well, I’ll Let You Go. Arranged as a series of two-handers across 90 intermissionless minutes this is a simpler but no less complex piece, as every member of the quartet is forced to address their convictions, resentments, and most painful feelings. “I keep thinking OK, what would Jesus do, but it never says,” Michael admits at one junction, facing the void that faith entails, as Paul wrestles with belief in God. The Atlantic’s last production, Indian Princesses, asked us to believe adult actresses as prepubescent girls, a heavy lift the play never overcame. But Howe and Rinzel are the real deal as the deeply conflicted teens, like watching my own and their friends squabble and make up, a torturous process we’ve all been through. The two of them are simply magnetic throughout, and handle the show’s heartbreak and humor with seeming ease.
Simons’ Playbill entry notes that both boys have more stage experience than him. The indie film actor is fine as Julian, a woebegone drifter raging against organized religion, which further sparks Paul’s nascent rebellion. But the twist Weiler knots for him is both obvious and unconvincing, and the spell the play casts over us dissipates when it leaves Paul and Michael. Faring better is Finn, a veteran stage actor, who is believably frazzled as a den mother type challenged and exasperated by Michael, who holds her in such impossibly high regard he wants her and not his parents to be his confirmation sponsor. But the material for the adults is lesser (and the first scene between Paul and Julian too darkly lit, eye-straining, for too long a time).
Before The Saviors begins we hear from the unseen parish bishop, whose voice booms across David Zinn’s truly immaculate set. He gives an upbeat talk about living with kindness and respect and standing up for and loving our neighbors, all elements of the good life that the play shows is difficult to actually live. It’s not a polemic, however, and it was refreshing to see a show about Catholic values and not church issues like abortion and child molestation. It took me back…and Howe and Rinzel transported me. Off Broadway audiences tend to be more reserved than Broadway ones and, dismayed that the two of them didn’t get a richly deserved standing ovation, I led one myself. What they’re doing up there, creating achingly vulnerable stage magic, is fantastic, and despite a few flaws they bring The Saviors to an absolutely devastating conclusion. Everybody on their feet!
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