Carlo Mancasola and Nicholas Anthony Reid (Photo by Jeff Lorch)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
Rogue Machine
Through Oct. 11
RECOMMENDED
Carlo Manssacola and Nicholas Anthony Reid (Photo by Jeff Lorch)
Samuel D. Hunter sets many of his plays in rural Idaho where he was raised. Call him the James Joyce of the American heartland. Just as Joyce derived inspiration from his native Dublin, Hunter, who now lives in New York, is an insightful émigré whose comical, touching work exploits the insularities and peculiarities of his former fellow Idahoans, whom he left behind for a more expansive urban context.
Little Bear Ridge Road, also set in Idaho, won the 2026 New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play. His 2025 play Grangeville, still running at the Ruskin Group Theater after multiple extensions, concerns two bitterly estranged brothers, one in Idaho, one in Holland, forced to communicate long-distance to discuss the care of their dementia-afflicted mother, who is lingering, unresponsive, in a coma.
Grangeville displayed Hunter’s humanistic mastery at its most assured. Unfortunately, the creative maturation so evident in that play is not immediately apparent in Rogue Machine’s production of A Case for the Existence of God. Although huge emotions underpin the play, it struggles to make dramatic leeway against a predictable premise and a wheel-spinning plot that defaults to the obvious.
Nicholas Anthony Reid plays Keith, a gay Black mortgage broker from an affluent Twin Falls family. He has been fostering the child of an addicted mother for two years in the hopes of adoption. Much to his distress, he learns that the child’s family may want the baby back.
One of Keith’s clients is Ryan (Carlo Mancasola), who may lose his own beloved toddler in a custody dispute. A lifelong have-not with disastrous credit, Ryan wants to buy a homestead that was sold out of his family decades before, convinced that the purchase will give him the secure home base needed to keep his child. Both men live for their little girls, the sole joy in their lives. As Keith struggles to find Ryan a mortgage, the two men form an unlikely but life-altering friendship as they both face the possibility of terrible loss.
As in Grangeville, also a two-hander, Existence provides ample opportunity for two gifted actors to shine. Veteran director John Perrin Flynn, the former artistic director of Rogue Machine, stages the proceeding with an emotional simplicity that makes the most of his material’s limitations. Mancasola is quite good, but it is Reid who is most riveting as a neurotic, wounded soul facing his worst fears. His agony flows outward, swamping us with its naturalistic force.
These two characters, who hail from vastly disparate backgrounds and educational levels, are linked only by a “specific sadness” — a freight of sorrow they have borne as long as they can remember. It’s little to have in common, but their unlikely friendship is the emotional life raft that buoys them through difficult times and is the most poignant and defining feature of Hunter’s problematic play.
Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, upstage on the Henry Murray Stage, 7657 Melrose Ave, Hollywood. Fri. and Mon., 8 pm, Sat.-Sun., 5 pm; thru Oct. 11. (No performances on Monday Sept 7 and 14). https://roguemachine.ludus.com Runtime: 90 minutes with no intermission.
