Michael Shannon, Kate Arrington, Paul Rudd and Ed Asner in Grace at the Cort Theatre. Image © Joan Marcus.
The presence of Hollywood Sandinista Ed Asner should have been a warning. Grace is a play about evangelical Christianity, entrepreneurship, and matrimony brought to you in association with the former president of the Democratic Socialists of America. You will not be surprised to learn that it is not very good. There is some decent writing and a very fine performance from the great Michael Shannon, lately of Boardwalk Empire, whose paranoiac take on the American everyman made last year’s Take Shelter a memorable piece of work.
The problem with Grace, as is so often the case when the monocultural men of the theater attempt to explore human horizons west of the Hudson, is that neither the writer nor the performers understand their subject, in this case the troubled evangelical entrepreneur Steve (Paul Rudd), who has relocated with his wife from Minnesota to Florida. He intends to launch a chain of Christian-themed hotels, the Crossroads Inn (“Where Would Jesus Stay?”), having just secured an agreement with an angel investor to bankroll the enterprise. That the author, Craig Wright, neglected to make something of the term “angel investor” suggests that he either is unfamiliar with the term or showed a bit of good judgment uncharacteristic of the rest of the play. As it is, Steve personifies every evangelical cliché in the book, a gold-plated biblioplangist who conflates success
