The Arts

THEATER REVIEW |

In "How to Write a New Book for the Bible," Bill Cain's mother insists her son not make her "look foolish."

Mary Cain can rest easy.

Mary is many things in this intimate, moving study of the playwright's family. Foolish she is not.

The Mary brought to vivid life in an incandescent performance by Linda Gehringer is sometimes in pain — and a pain in the keister. She is also loving, willful, exuberant, self-doubting, scared and humbled by adversity. And very good company.

By the time Mary exits the play (and the world), she has touched, amused and heartened her loved ones (and her audience) with her "ordinary" humanity.

But there really is no such thing as ordinary in the theatrical outlook of Cain, who's on a creative roll lately with this new work, and his recent Steinberg Award-winning dramas "Equivocation" and "9 Circles."

Cain's stage surrogate Bill (expertly played by Tyler Pierce, with sardonic naturalness and in eloquent voice), narrates the story of caring for his mother, as she succumbs to cancer in her 80s. And he exhorts us to join him in a quest to find the miraculous in the mundane, to give life meaning by elevating our family stories to the status of biblical tales — "the stuff of revelations."

That Cain succeeds so well makes "How to Write a New Book for the Bible" compelling viewing. This is no exercise in the maudlin and morbid (though, at a chunky two-and-a-half hours, we could be spared some clinical details and a few repetitive encounters.)

There's poetic resonance in Scott Bradley's set design for director Kent Nicholson's scrupulous, sensitive mounting of the play (a coproduction of Seattle Rep, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where it debuted last fall).

The stage is simply dressed with a door, chairs, a wooden trunk. But the enchanted upper reaches of the set (artfully lit by Alexander V. Nichols) twinkle with crystal lamps and glass mobiles, and a window opening into the infinite.

Author Cain is an ordained Jesuit priest, hence Bill's many allusions to religion (and tendency to sermonize).

But there is as much questioning of faith as allegiance to it here. And Bill's existential quandaries ("half the time, I don't know what God is"), while caring for Mary and recalling his sibling Paul (played by Aaron Blakely) and father Pete (Leo Marks), reflect the general human condition — not any religious sect or dogma.

Drawing heavily from Cain's personal diaries, this searching anamnesis unspools with a cogent circularity also employed in "Equivocation" (a similarly philosophical rumination, on the nexus of art, politics and family, seen at the Rep in 2009.)

Pierce's Bill is a guide whose memories skip around over decades. There are fainter portraits of Paul and Pete, but Marks poignantly conveys in flashbacks Pete's patient candor, and Blakely movingly conveys Paul's bottled-up anguish over his military combat experiences (uncorked during a profound visit to the national Vietnam War memorial).

Yet the play belongs, in a primal sense, to Mary, and to the rarely dramatized bond between an adult son and a flawed but cherished mother.

Defining family stories as a source of spiritual meaning, Bill finds divinity in the "irreplaceable, unrepeatable, unlimited worth" of his relations — as Cain does in the theatrical act itself.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published Jan. 20, 2012, was corrected Jan. 21, 2012. A previous version of this story misidentified the show's director, who is Kent Nicholson, and omitted the name of Aaron Blakely, who plays the character Paul.