Grace

HEAVEN CAN WAIT Atheist Redgrave, left, has no faith in faith.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

Watching Grace family-weepie-cum-play-of-ideas about atheism and faith, is somewhat like what most people experience at a religious service: The event is generally predictable and offers a mix of boring bits, sweet sentiments and the rare flash of insight. To expect true ecstasy or enlightenment would be asking too much, but the lack of thrills might lead you to doubt the existence of God (or, for those of us living in the 21st century, artistic excellence).

Full disclosure: I’m a happy atheist aesthete, quite sure that God is a vestigial instinct from the days when knuckles dragged and woolly mammoth was good eatin’. Why worship invisible tribal delusions when you can bow before Shakespeare and Beethoven? So I found myself rooting for Grace Friedman (Redgrave), a British naturalist and celebrity nonbeliever, a distaff Richard Dawkins. Grace is appalled when her lawyer son Tom (Isaac) decides to become a priest. Tom’s girlfriend, Ruth (Moggie), and his father, Tony (Goodwin), are also troubled by the sudden conversion, but for different reasons—and they express themselves with less eloquent venom than Grace. The play shuffles its sequences, and Joseph Hardy’s ghostly production leaves no doubt that fanatical violence will shatter the Friedmans’ lives.

Mick Gordon and philosopher AC Grayling’s well-researched script (produced last year in London under the businesslike title On Religion) offers bracing speeches for Grace to rail against what she sees as the irrational, absurd aspects of God-fearing. Such rhetoric is balanced by touching, earnest articulations of belief. There are radical-intellectual joys to be had here, but in the end, family psychology trumps everything. Although necessary and engaging, this searching but typical domestic drama won’t overcome the most pernicious of blind faiths: convention.

—David Cote