Grace | The Week

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briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. “Broadway isn’t often the place to ponder big questions,” said DAVID ROONEY in _THE

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER_. That’s why the ambition of this 2004 Craig Wright play is striking. Four characters lie dead in the opening scene, and as _Grace_ proceeds to unpack the events that led

to the carnage, it brings God’s existence under interrogation and explores “the gray zone separating divine intervention from fate.” A sterling quartet of actors—led by Paul Rudd as a

born-again Christian who, in the play’s extended flashback, is trying to launch a chain of Jesus-themed hotels—proves deft in handling the writing’s subtleties. This Broadway premiere “won’t

be for everyone,” but it generates a compellingly unsettling mood. Unfortunately, the time-rewinding device feels like “a lot of fussy bric-a-brac” veiling the play’s loose ends, said SCOTT

BROWN in _NEW YORK_ magazine. _Grace_ has moments: There are “a couple of flawlessly uncomfortable scenes” in which the optimism of Rudd’s evangelical collides with the despair of his

Florida neighbor, a former NASA scientist (Michael Shannon) who’s recently been disfigured by a car accident. Playing a jaded pest exterminator, Ed Asner helps make the show “highly

watchable” throughout, in part because Wright is able to “pass power, offense, and attack back and forth between characters like nobody’s business.” But it’s clear early on that Rudd’s

character doesn’t stand a chance against his next-door rival, while his wife, played by Kate Arrington, comes off as “just another inchoate woman getting rag-dolled between rampaging males.”

“If _Grace_ is remembered in years to come,” it will be because of _Boardwalk Empire_’s Shannon, said BEN BRANTLEY in _THE NEW YORK TIMES_. As the wounded man he portrays begins questioning

his atheism and falls for his neighbor’s wife, Shannon’s “electrically anxious acting”gives weight to the character’s plight. “_Grace_ isn’t as intellectually unsettling as it means to be,”

but Shannon gives it “achingly human impact.” A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com