100 Saints You Should Know

BEYOND BELIEF Kazan questions Shamos about God.

Photo: Joan Marcus

The characters in Kate Fodor’s 100 Saints You Should Know form an archipelago of would-be islands: They are so used to being lonely that they don’t even recognize their best chances at the sense of connection they yearn for. Matthew (Shamos), a bookish Catholic priest who has been suspended for possessing erotic photographs, reflexively retreats into shyness; his Irish mother, Colleen (Smith), falls back on bluff maternal fortitude. Theresa (Maloney), an atheist who cleans the rectory at Matthew’s church, has a weary, routinized toughness—having outgrown her old rebel trappings, she can’t afford to replace them—and her teenage daughter, Abby (an incisive, mercurial Zoe Kazan), hides behind a shield of sarcastic impertinence. The rotating set they inhabit, designed by Rachel Hauck, is dominated by a tall, leafless tree whose silvery sleekness recalls the gloss of an ice storm.

Under Ethan McSweeny’s astute guidance, 100 Saints You Should Know’s first-rate cast (which also includes Will Rogers as a sweetly inchoate delivery boy) is beautifully alert to the recurrent sense of missed opportunity built into Fodor’s writing—those moments in which tentative gestures of goodwill are overlooked or deflected, and the ripples of defensiveness that follow. But the scenes that linger most affectingly after the curtain are those in which some small breakthrough is awkwardly accomplished: Theresa stroking Matthew’s head in a hospital emergency room, for instance, or Abby lowering her defenses after a terrifying night. At its best, this gentle, lovely new play leaves you not just touched, but more sensitive to the value of touch itself.